Video: The Next Big Thing in Searching?
Posted by Harry McCracken | Tuesday, January 25, 2005 8:54 AM PT
Just when you thought search-engine companies were pouring all their resources into new tools to search your hard drive, there's suddenly a new Holy-Grail-of-Search: Video content. Google has launched
an experimental search engine for video, and Yahoo has responded by
unveiling its own video tool. And then there's
Blinkx.tv, yet another competitor from the lesser-known but inventive Blinkx.
All three services currently feel more like interesting ideas than fully-baked services--especially Google Video, which doesn't even actually get you to video clips yet, just summaries of them. Blinkx TV is probably the most polished contender so far, with search results that actually show you little moving video clips. (At the moment, of course, Web audio is more highly evolved than Web video--so it's nice to see that Blinkx TV does searches for online radio, too.)
Video search may still be in proof-of-concept stage, but as more and more TV shows up on the Web, it's clear that every search engine will need to tackle it eventually. So I'm glad that Google and its rivals are figuring out how to do that now--and it'll be fun to watch their services evolve. (Both the Google and Yahoo services are prominently marked as being in beta.)
For more on Google Video, see
this story by my IDG News colleague Agam Shah.
If you've tried out any of these services, I'd love to know what you think.
I'm very excited about the Yahoo Video search engine because it actually searches the web for video. Blinkx, as I understand it, only searches media outlets and not the entire web. It's like looking for a video title in the TV guide. It might be playing that week but if it doesn't show up in the search, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The web offers an opportunity to independent filmmakers to distribute their work without a TV station. If Google and Blinkx only offer pre-selected networks as their database, they're really doing a disservice to their users.
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This is not a new idea, and has been executed in MUCH BETTER ways before. The pioneer for this sort of a service were ShadowTV (www.shadowtv.com), about 4 years back AFAIK. They have a fairly successful subscriber base, mostly corporate, though they ought to release a consumer product with the fab technology.
Another firm called TV Eyes (www.tveyes.com) merits attention as well.
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