Google video search

Looks like the rumors of Google video search are real.

It's being widely reported that Google launched their video search in Google Labs. Right now, it searches the closed caption text from eight TV channels. Obviously, just a first step, but it is an interesting step.

Many great comments on this development across the blogosphere. Some excerpts:

Chris Sherman
"One interesting twist to the service is that it indexes all content broadcast by the television stations [including advertising] ... Google Video ... differs from Yahoo's recently announced video search prototype and AOL's Singingfish streaming media search, both of which use metadata rather than closed caption information."

Gary Price
"After taking a look at Google Video, here are other video search services you'll want to take a look at..."

Eric Bangeman
"The new service underscores Google's ambitions to be the premier information source for computer users. Whether you want to search for a phrase in an old college paper on your home computer, look for highlights from last night's sports action, or find a passage in a favorite book, Google wants to be the company serving up the information. And some ads to go along with it."

Michael Bazeley
"We're thinking a lot right now about the distributed media landscape (blogs, podcasting, RSS, Tivo, videoblogging), the convergence of the Internet and the TV, and which aggregator/search engine is going to cobble together our daily media experiences in the future."

Brad Hill
"Google Video is all about TV, and would be better named Google TV ... As Google TV the service would be unique. As Google Video it is embarrassing [compared to Yahoo Video]."

Charlene Li
"Google has built their own technology to capture broadcasts (they set up their own rabbit ears to pull programming from local Bay Area stations) and index the video streams. But you can’t view the videos themselves!"

Nathan Weinberg
"You want some sad news for Google lovers? For the moment, Yahoo Video Search is way better. Google has no watchable videos, and no video older than seven weeks ago."

John Piscitello
"It's just an early-stage beta product at this point; you'll only see stills and text snippets from shows that match your search terms, and you can only search shows from a few channels, dating back to December, 2004, when we started compiling the index. But we'll be steadily improving Google Video in the months to come, so as they say in the TV biz, stay tuned."

See also my earlier post, "Query-free news search".