World Wide Web
Keywords:
Web, Search, Video, Google, Blinkx
Check out blinkx.com. Blinkx
has indexed the audio
of "seven million hours of video" found on the web to make them
internally searchable. CacheLogic, Cambridge, England, reports that with
the YouTube phenomenon, etc. 60 percent of web traffic is now in video heading
toward 98 percent. Google conquered the "first, text-based era of the
Web," but relies upon often incomplete and inaccurate metadata surrounding
videos to render them searchable. Blinkx's automated speech
recognition - "effective speech recognition is a 'nontrivial'
problem in the language of computer scientists" - uses "'hidden
Markov models'" for contextual analysis. Author describes effectively
searching for SNL "Lazy Sunday" video and compares to Google search.
Google is probably not ignoring this issue; TruVeo, Flurl, and ClipBlast
are in this space, too. And audio is only one side of video - what
about indexing and making
video imagery searchable? John R. Smith at IBM's
T .J. Watson Research Center's working on experimental search engine for
videos called Marvel that
includes "visual information."
John Battelle, author of The Search about Google, makes the point
that search is the gateway to the
Internet. Expect more. My own thought: this article neglects the
important role social networking plays for folks using the web. Like-interested
people connect thru social sites or sites managing links. For example, when
I used Blinkx to search Frank Lloyd Wright, I soon found a plethora of Wright
videos on YouTube just by linking to one from the search. Search is only
the first step, when starting cold.