The Web has gone wacky for video. From Animal Planet to zefrank.com, sites now brim with clips. The problem: Search engines can’t index video files as easily as text. That’s tripping up the Web’s next great leap forward. So the race is on to become the Google of video search. And guess what? It might not be Google.
TechniqueWho’s trying itHow it worksWiredTired
Scanning the scriptBlinkx, TVEyes Everything said in a clip is tracked through voice recognition software, closed-caption information, or a combination of the two. Hunts down TV news references to, say, Lindsay Lohan. A mere mention of her name doesn’t guarantee Lindsay is in the clip.
Identifying what’s being shownGoogle, UCSD’s Statistical Visual Computing Lab, VideoMining Algorithms try to figure out what’s in the video by monitoring attributes like behavior and movement (VideoMining), faces (Google), and objects (UCSD). Finds friends, public figures, or specific actions like car chases. The tech is stuck in the lab or limited to specialized search tasks.
Analyzing links and metadataDabble, Google Conventional search spiders scan the text around a video and the pages that link to it. The fastest and best way to search for video data. Can’t “see” what’s in the videos or locate specific action in a long clip.
