Friday, January 26, 2007
Conquering Video Search: The Race is On
byIt’s easy to build a case that video will continue to transform the online world, but a significant obstacle remains: an effective, comprehensive video search engine. Today’s Washington Post details the various efforts to champion this rich but technically-challenging opportunity.
The advancements are steady but video search remains vastly undeveloped compared to other search venues. Yesterday, Google announced it will begin including YouTube clips in its search results – a likely pairing given Google’s acquisition of the video-sharing site. But Google, like others, is far from mastering video search.
A key complication is indexing the millions of videos added to the Web each day. Automating the process is especially difficult with video, and other approaches rely on the uneven and incomplete descriptions added by users. From the Post story:
One process involves scanning words, such as captions, titles or short descriptions written by the person who uploads the clip to the Web. A more sophisticated approach adapts speech recognition technology to the words spoken in a video to find the best matches … Some firms are experimenting with image scanning technology to recognize content in the video clip. Others, such as Blinkx, are experimenting with facial-recognition technology that would match videos of well-known faces, such as celebrities and politicians, to help categorize them.
As the Post story points out, refining the video search world will create significant segmentation and advertising potential. It’ll be intriguing to follow the advancements in the next year or two.
