Google Video Search Needs To Improve
Michael Arrington
23 comments »
Google announced today that they are adding YouTube videos to searches on Google Video. They also said “Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world’s online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.” Eventually, I imagine we will see an end to new uploads on Google video, as they turn it into a pure search engine. “Google’s strength — and its history — is grounded in search” they say in the post.
What isn’t clear is that Google will be very good at video search which, like their image search, is based entirely on metadata bolted on to the videos. Their track record in media search is a big snooze so far - they’ve experimented with using human labor to add tags to images, while startups like Riya (through it’s new Like.com product) are actually trying to analyze the images themselves when returning results. Google almost acquired Riya a year ago, but pulled out at the last minute. Today, Google is not the first place I go to search for images. It’s Flickr.
Google is already far behind in video search. AOL, through their Truveo acquisition in January 2006, is the best “big company” product because it tries to contextualize video, adding descriptive data that other search engines can’t find.
There’s a very young startup called CastTV which also does video search, and is a step or two beyond what Truveo had the last time we looked. Like Truveo, CastTV finds video that other search engines can’t locate, and does a very good job of guessing what content is included. The company has “signed a term sheet” for their Series A round of funding and says they have already turned down a number of acquisition offers.
I would not be surprised to see Google take a look at CastTV, which has just a handful of employees, and make a quick acquisition. Or perhaps search is such a core Google pride that they will build something themselves. But whatever they do, I won’t be betting that Google will let AOL have the best of breed video search on the net for long.
I had an idea for a search engine that only returns business listings that have an online store more than just a directory is their anything out there like that michael????
for $1.65 billion dollars, you bet they will try each and every way to see if they can capitalize on their investment.
It will be interesting to see if google does indeed acquire another start-up (like CastTV) to streamline google video search.
One obvious improvement is for them to use speech recognition to add the full audio to their search index (see Pluggd). With all that data, the sky’s the limit for search/categorization/similarity algorithms.
Of course, that’s not going to help someone find a video of a monkey falling out of a tree. (But don’t worry, I will: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUYPZkwC4R8)
Possibly Google Video will focus on Paid Downloads or Purchases - while YouTube is the the Free and amateur service that appears to be its base.
Ultimately, the concerns over copyrights must be resolved - this would be a step in that direction.
Google can still be a Meta Search and incorporate ultra hi tech Search features - as they become practical to do so…
BTW:
Google just introduced new Anti-Googlebombing Algos into the SERPs - read the Webmaster blog or the Spam chiefs blog.
I’m a heavy user of the big 4 video sites: Google, YouTube, Yahoo, and MySpace, mostly for uploading purpose.
This integration of Google Video and YouTube is creating a problem. Although it’s only the first day of their integration, so I’m assuming they are working to improve on the algorithm. But here is a problem I discover: due to the sheer number of YouTube videos and the fact that most YouTube videos have higher viewing numbers, when you search for videos on Google, the first resulting videos are almost all YouTube videos, in fact they are almost identical to the resulting videos if you go search on YouTube. Try typing “Britney Spears” on both Google Video Search and YouTube, you’ll see what I mean.
I can just imagine those who have only uploaded their videos to Google exclusively are finding their videos fall way down on the “relevance” ranking system, for the simple reason that YouTube videos (and they are massive in number) are crowding them down.
I find Flickr very limited because of the lack of anything other than uploaded photos from Joe Public’s digicam. It’s great for finding a sunset over the andes, but I more often find that one of the engines finds what I’m after.
Ask.com’s image search seems to perform pretty well. Are they doing anything different?
I hope that Google will lay a fair game, and not promote YouTube videos over competitors’ ones such as Metacafe, Daily Motion, Revver and many others.
Since Youtube dominates the video sharing world, I’m sure that even if Google will play a fair game, Youtube’s videos will dominate search results as well, thus drawing lots of criticism.
Fortune 500 list keeps churning those orgs. which become powerful, clunky and unweildy like the dinosours become extinct. New more talent keeps entering the market.
Say what, Friend.
http://blogs.ibibo.com/TechnicalJournal
I just heard this amazing talk earlier this week at MIT in Boston by a guy from http://www.podzinger.com which if you haven’t heard is a speech to text system that came out of BBN. It can essentially takes any media and converts it into a xml transcript that they index and make searchable, you can also play a clip by just clicking on the word you want to start from in the transcript. To be honest when I saw the demo it blew me away and I was thinking that this would be a great way for Google or any media content provider to improve their search system.
I read a story recently about how some felt that Google was trying to do too many things. The suggestion was that it should focus on current projects. I am fascinated by its corporate culture. I hope that it remains quick and nimble.
Check out AOL Video Search at video.aol.com. It uses Truveo’s video search technology to crawl the web and discover videos as they are published on YouTube, Google, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, ABC, NBC, CNN, etc. Truveo’s technology does a better job of not only finding videos on the web, but also finding the metadata associated with those videos, which makes it possible to return the most relevant results to users.
The APIs that power AOL Video Search are very powerful and you can see a broad range of their capabilities exposed at searchvideo.com. The APIs are also open and there are currently over 200 3rd party developers who are working with the APIs. You can find out more about the APIs at developer.searchvideo.com.
Image searches are really hard to make. Media doesn’t have a lot of metadata to define it. Also, it’s really hard to evaluate the value of a TV show vs, say, a how-to article because the meaning of a TV show (or any entertainment) is vague and subjective.
Google can not and should not put all their eggs in one basket.
Innovation has been the key element to Google success, so they sould
continue inventing and innovating. I was a great competive strategy to dominate YouTube by buying it but they have to continue doing more
to sustain their competive strategies.
Google can not and should not put all their eggs in one basket.
It was a great competive strategy to dominate YouTube by buying it, but Google has to continue doing more to sustain their competive strategies.
Innovation has been the key element to Google’s success, so they should
continue inventing and improving.
“The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be only sustainable competitive advantage.”
–Arie de Geus quotes
“The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be only sustainable competitive advantage.”
and google is very fast!
I agree that Google will definately have to improve on their search capabilities in the video sector. It’s definately a good idea to keep YouTube as a separate entity of Google since users are already familiar and attached to the brand. YouTube has already developed itself into a great video-sharing community while Google as always been associated with search.
Carm Hurtress: Great that you got to meet the folks at PodZinger. They are a client of mine and they are doing some pretty amazing things. Not sure if you knew, but they recently started searching YouTube content too with its speech to text technology and you can litereally search for terms people say in the videos.
Michael: You seem really interested in the companies in the video search space and I wonder if you are interested to chat further on what PodZinger is doing with the YouTube videos. Email me if you are and I’ll be happy to connect you.
Try searchforvideo, think you will like it.
Wasn’t it Tech Crunch and Web 2.0 that touted the benefits of tagging?
So now you have to rely on “proper” tagging instead of searching by logical categories (hierarchies) or a simple keyword search
Not only is AOL Video search the most relevant, but we recently integrated the free APIs from developer.aolvideo.com…. now our site has a very robust video search engine - increasing page views and average length of stay!!
“Today, Google is not the first place I go to search for images. It’s Flickr.”
That depends entirely on what you want the photos for.
That explains why the Youtube videos showed up on page 3 of my Google videos this morning! Search by scanning the actual video content would be a blessing. Keeping a eye on that one.
Keith Breazeal http://www.kbvp.com
I think google video search is pretty good all and all. For videos with Closed Captioning you can search by text and link directly to the search term. I have a screenshot of this on my blog.
http://fifteenips.livejournal.com/235928.html
Closed captioning is a must for section 508 compliance in Government and EDU.