Monday, November 29, 2004

Google TV search

Stefanie Olsen at CNet reports on Google, Yahoo, and MSN's efforts on search for video streams.

One particularly interesting excerpt on Google TV search:
    Google's project for TV search is ultra-secretive; only a handful of broadcast executives have seen it demonstrated so far. To build the service, the company is recording live TV shows and indexing the related closed-caption text of the programming. It uses the text to identify themes, concepts and relevant keywords for video so they can be triggers for searching.

    The software allows people to type in keywords, such as "Jon Stewart," to retrieve video clips of the comedian's TV appearances, marked with a thumbnail picture with some captioning text, for example. Refining the search results for the show "Crossfire" would display a page that looks similar to a film reel, with various still images paired with excerpts of closed captioned text of the now-infamous fight between Stewart and CNN's "Crossfire" hosts. The searcher could click on and watch a specific segment of the show.
Watch out TiVo (and Comcast, DirectTV, ...).

See also my earlier post, "Query-free news search" which mentions a Google paper on searching television close caption text to find related news articles.

[via Search Engine Watch Blog]

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