Google Moves Into Video

prostoalex writes "Google will start indexing previously aired content from ABC, PBS, Fox News and C-SPAN and offer it as part of its Web search. No fancy speech-to-text recognition, just the closed captioning provided by the television networks, and no direct links to videocontent either." Right now, most of the channels are SF Bay area stations, but obviously more will be coming along. I saw a demo of this about six months or so ago - it's pretty cool, and interesting to see how far it has come.

Comments

Not as good as it sounds

[ironfrost]

From the article:

Search engine analyst Charlene Li of Forrester Research said Google's latest innovation is likely to disappoint many people because it doesn't provide a direct link to watch the previously broadcast programming.

Google instead is displaying up to five still video images from the indexed television programs, as well as snippets from the show's narrative. The search results also will provide a breakdown on when the program aired and when an episode is scheduled to be repeated. Local programming information will be available for those who provide a ZIP code.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[dschuetz]

Google instead is displaying up to five still video images from the indexed television programs, as well as snippets from the show's narrative. The search results also will provide a breakdown on when the program aired and when an episode is scheduled to be repeated. Local programming information will be available for those who provide a ZIP code.

Hey, even that is an great service. Of course, the closed captioning is rarely very good. I never understand how, on a show that was produced weeks before it was aired, the captions are often messed up, or missing key words. Captions (also on DVD subtitles) seem to be shorthand summaries of what was said, when it's usually possible for them to be exact transcripts.

Sometimes it's not a big deal, but sometimes they miss an important point or nuance.

What'd be great, though, is real honest-to-god searching of the audio. I've seen demos where you can literally type in "helicopter," and you'll get hotlinks to the exact times in the video wherever that word was said. It's fscking amazing. Not sure it's a publicly available technology yet, tho...but the capability is definitely out there, and I'm sure we're not the only people playing with this.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[LocoMan]

I have added subtitles to a few videos (I work on a video production place, and sometimes we get a video in english that a company wants subtitled in spanish for their people to see, or a video we made for them in spanish subtitled to english to distribute internationally to their clients), and subtitles/captions most of the times must be shorter than what was said (specially in fast dialogue) or most people will just not have enough time to read what was said. The general rule of using text in video is that it must be there on screen at least enough time to read it twice at a leisurely pace. Of course, this can't be used when doing subtitles or captions, but you can't really expect people to read as fast as it's spoken or more often than not they won't have finished reading by the time it switches to the next piece of text.

Not sure if you've seen it, but you should see some of the spanish subtitles I've read... sometimes even entire pieces of conversations are changed because the correct translation would take too long on the screen to read... and of course there are the odd translations that are completely off the mark (I remember a version of the wing commander movie I saw where the name of the main ship, the Tiger's Claw, even if it was written several times on the movie, kept being translated at the "Tiger's Clock")

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[earthman]

Keep in mind that not everybody is a highly trained speedreader. Sometimes you must summarize, otherwise you end up with either a screen full of text, or the captions flashing by like subliminal messages.

Of course there is no excuse for errors in subtitling if they had plenty of time for checking it.

Re:Not as good as it sounds

[LWATCDR]

1. Many times life time deaf people can not read as fast as hearing people.
2. Captions have a limited bandwidth. usually 60 chars a second.
3. For the pop up style captions on most recorded TV shows there is first a build time follows by a display command. The build can not during a commercial brake so you have to wait until the show starts again.
4. To do a good job captioning takes a long time. As much as 10 hours to do one hour of captioning. Corners get cut.
5. Text takes space on the screen.
Captioning does provide a good way to search video. I would love to see a hack for say myth tv where it monitors cnn, or msnbc or the news channel of your choice for key words. When it finds them it starts to record.

Re:Whoops

[zavfoud]

"detrimental performance impact on their servers from the increased exposure" This is google not World of Warcraft. ;)

This doesn't change anything....

[The-Bus]

Google Suggest's 'p' search term will definitely still be Paris Hilton.

Focus on searching

[Underholdning]

I know googles mission is to index all the information out there - and they're on the right track. This is probably a step in the right direction, but IMHO it's too early.
I'd much rather have them to spend time presenting the currently indexed information. It's almost impossible to find information on any piece of hardware these days without having to walk through dozens of pages trying to sell that piece of hardware.

Re:Focus on searching

[odyrithm]

try for example: pentium p4 -buy

- is your friend, use it wisely.

already started

[stefankoegl]

indexing has already started december 2004 and the services was launched today at http://video.google.com/

great.. just great

[apostrophesemicolon]

now how will C-Span's coverage of White House speeches deal with teh great use of English literature such as the following?

Bush:
"nucular"
"abu.. abu.. abu.. abu grabby prison"

Rumsfeld:
"here are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."

Re:great.. just great

[wuzfuzzy]

Rumsfelds comments are in perfect English. This has been debated here before. This is a known known.

Blinx.com

[joeykiller]

As cool as Google is, I also think Blinx.com's search deserves mentioning. According to their white paper they transcribe video content on the fly, and you can even set up "smart searches" which notifies you when new content matching your search becomes available.

This apparently only applies to video content available on the web, but I guess it could potentially be done with TV content as well. It seems to me like this -- if it works -- is one step ahead of Google's approach.

the submitter forgot the link

[zr-rifle]

it's obviously video.google.com

Needs tweaking

[costas]

The results seem to be skewed when the search term is a person or character in the show: check out the search for Carson and notice how almost every result is the Carson Daily show with hardly any news on Johny Carson --because every second line in the closed captions is "Carson >".

Including Commercials

[technix4beos]

It appears the search engine still doesn't distinguish from commercials.

Check out this link to the word "Enterprise":

http://video.google.com/videopreview?q=enterprise& time=1635000&page=1&docid=-461731869880380565&urlc reated=1106660109&chan=KBHK&prog=Star+Trek%3A+Ente rprise+%7C+Observer+Effect&date=Sun+Jan+23+2005+at +8%3A00+PM+PST&hmac=p/JYdFPwXt3fhHNmwFo9vvVaTYY.

I for one welcome our search engine overlords...

[bigdaddyhame]

Google = SkyNet.

So when exactly does the Google A.I. go online? Just curious so I can start caching weapons in the desert.

Re:Cool

[ceeam]

Sure, use www.google.ca, groups.google.ca.

It is possible for them to do more than one thing

[blorg]

...you know; they do have ~2k employees. By your logic, we wouldn't have Google News, GMail, G Groups, G Desktop, Froogle, Orkut, G Suggest, G Print, G Calculator, pdf/doc search, Picasa, etc. etc.*

Google employees get to spend a day a week working on a project that interests them - good for employee morale, and some of these pet projects have turned out very useful indeed.

*yes, I know some of these were originally purchases.

Yahoo and google 2 different approaches??

[Darthmalt]

Google looks to be providing transcripts and information of videos whereas Yahoo is providing the videos themselves.

Compare the results of these two searches for the daily show

YAHOO
GOOGLE

Surprisingly GOOGLE doesnt actually show the daily show just programs that mention it.