Google's Video Search Gadget: The Holy Grail of Search

Full-text search of video has been the Holy Grail of search — or at least one of them — for years now, pursued by startups like Blinkx and others. The vast majority of video searching involves the text that surrounds a video (the description, tags, keywords, etc.) but that only scratches the surface of what is possible.

Now Google has given us a glimpse of what full-text search might look like, although for now it is restricted to a handful of political clips and is only available as a gadget for embedding on your Google home page.

When you search for a word, the video progress bar is marked with yellow strips where the word appears, and hovering over the strip shows you the word in context.

Will this be added to all of YouTube someday? We can only hope.

Comments

[TomWilde:]

Indeed the holy grail. We have already deployed this capability across many of our customer sites. Check out multimedia.foxsports.c... as an example of a full text index of videos generated by EveryZing's speech-to-text engine and publishing solution.

-Tom Wilde
CEO, EveryZing

2008 Jul 17 09:42 AM