Thursday, November 04, 2004

Query-free news search

Interesting paper by several people at Google, including Sergey Brin (co-founder). It describes research work to match text news articles to TV news reports. Clever idea.

It uses the text in the close captions and tries to find news articles on the same event or topic. It's not a recommendation system -- they're finding other writeups of the same story, not different but relevant stories -- but it's still worth a peek.

On a related note, according to Sergey Brin's amusingly outdated resume, he once prototyped a movie recommendation system. Small world.

Update: Nathan Weinberg calls this "GoogleTV" and discusses the implications.

Update: Gary Price lists a bunch of tools that provide keyword search over close caption text (although none of them seem to do it implicitly, which is the focus of the Google paper). And Danny Sullivan talked about blending search and TV a couple weeks ago.

2 comments:

Thomas Hawk said...

Greg, how about getting (from the closed captions) full text transcripts of all television and having it available for public search via Google, Yahoo!, etc.?

Greg Linden said...

If you're interested in this kind of work, you might also check out SpeechBot from HP Research. It allows keyword searches over audio streams by using speech recognition to convert the audio streams to text.