Google Video Search
Google launched video search tonight and doing a quick Google Video Search for TiVo shows you that it's pretty good at pulling out all the mentions of the company in the 24 hour news cycle. Lots of little news shows showing up in the screenshots. It goes beyond simply search through transcripts and actually shows screengrabs of when the words were mentioned. Does this mean Google has a Myth or TiVo farm somewhere in the Bay Area, sucking down every single channel's video to index for the search engine?
I can't wait to see this new thing grow -- hopefully someday soon all that video will be one click away to view. Maybe they could even become an iTunes Movie Store and sell shows/movies too?
It would be nice if they could add TiVo links so I could record the episode of Maury with a guy named "Chicken Head" that I found.
Posted by: George Hotelling | January 25, 2005 at 05:41 AM
There are companies out there that do this already. this was big in this past election cycle where they record everything and software automatically transcribes it and indexes and everything.
maybe google is partnering with them or running something similar. its great technology.
Also, one of the campaigns did have a TiVo farm up so that they could literally record every news channel and show so that if there was something worth putting into a commercial, it would be there....already...i won't say which campaign used this but it was effective in the i did vote for it before i voted against it.....
Posted by: Scott | January 25, 2005 at 07:45 AM
I am thinking it uses closed captioning.
Posted by: Bill | January 25, 2005 at 12:24 PM
Interesting that you mention an iTunes Movie store. . . you're not the only one to think that is on the way.
See this article by Robert Cringely at pbs.org
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050120.html
Posted by: Than | January 25, 2005 at 06:28 PM
I wonder if it could search shows already broadcast; for instance, if I type "Carnac's last appearance on Tonight Show", I'll get that?
Posted by: Jerome Nicholson | January 25, 2005 at 10:21 PM
Jerome: It's just like Google. You get the best matches to the terms you enter. You might find the last time Johnny did Carnac, you might find news items referencing Carson's death and the fact that one of his acts on the "Tonight Show" was "Carnac" and his "last" episode was taped in 91(?). You might get some even more off-the-wall items.
Just like looking for anything else in Google, the more data that it gathers, the more stuff you have to weed through to find what you want. The hot items move to the top of the pile, which can help tremendously in finding what you're looking for. I'm not trying to explain to you how to use Google or anything, I'm just saying that it is Google for video and there's really not much else there just yet. Actually, there are only a few weeks of shows even at all right now, so you'll definately not find anything broadcast years ago. I'm not even sure they'll ever be able to do that, as it appears they're just cataloguing video feeds from the networks and not actually the individual videos.
Posted by: Jason Coleman | January 26, 2005 at 01:56 PM
Where I work we've got a farm of about 15 Tivos recording all the news channels 24/7 and dumping out transcripts from the closed captioning. The only thing we don't have on top of it is a googlesque search engine.
Posted by: Oliver | January 26, 2005 at 11:07 PM
I work at http://mediamatters.org for the record.
Posted by: Oliver | January 26, 2005 at 11:08 PM
If you like Google Video, you will love BlinkxTV. BlinkxTV transcribes all the programs on its own without any need for outside help, like closed captioning. It is really easy to navigate through programs and is only one click away. Maybe one day Google will be as good, but don't wait for it. Definitely check out Blinkx.
Posted by: kyle | January 28, 2005 at 04:43 PM
I just tried out blinkxTV and was really impressed. I had no idea who they were and was just searching for video search when I came across blinkTV, theyt have so many channels and real video. Its quite impressive. I am not sure why google doesnt have this yet, or what is the delay. But blinkxTV is really working for me!
Posted by: Susy | February 01, 2005 at 02:53 PM
The Google Video is pretty decent although there is little coverage of television stations as of yet.
http://googlevideos.blogspot.com
Posted by: Chris | October 10, 2005 at 05:13 PM
punny punny p p p p p punny
URZ
Posted by: zsrh | October 10, 2006 at 01:30 AM