Journalism Research and Random Meanderings

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Search Video with Google 

As if Google wasn't incredible enough the anti-Microsoft has a video archive search in beta.

"Our mission is to organize the world's information, and that includes the thousands of programs that play on our TVs every day. Google Video enables you to search a growing archive of televised content – everything from sports to dinosaur documentaries to news shows.

Just type in your search term (for instance, ipod or Napa Valley) or do a more advanced search (for instance, title:nightline) and Google Video will search the closed captioning text of all the programs in our archive for relevant results. Click on a program title on your results page and you can look through short snippets of the text along with still images from the show. Visit the "About this show" side panel to learn when this show will air next.

Right now we're just testing this product, so you'll find programs only from a limited number of channels, which we've been indexing since late December 2004. You can expect to see more and more content as we continue to add new channels."

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For example searching for wardrobe malfunction brings up 126 hits including multiple hits on six different Inside Edition shows in February alone which is really odd. The Nipplegate incident is more than a year old, this year's SuperBowl is over yet they apparently mention it four times in the first four minutes of the thirty minute show on February 6th. I'm sure Google had more substantive applications in mind when the service was created.

Check out Google Video Help to see how to conduct a video search by program title or channel.

===PB===