[January 25, 2005]

Google Tuning In

BY JOHANNE TORRES

Search giant Google Inc. made news today, when the company announced the availability of Google Video beta—a new service that will let users search the content of television programs from TV content providers including PBS, the NBA, Fox News, and C-SPAN, among others. Today’s announcement reveals the company’s plans to adapt its search technology to everyday consumers’ processes.

"What Google did for the web, Google Video aims to do for television," said Larry Page, Google co-founder and president of Products. "This preview release demonstrates how searching television can work today. Users can search the content of TV programs for anything, see relevant thumbnails, and discover where and when to watch matching television programs. We are working with content owners to improve this service by providing additional enhancements such as playback."

The Google Video beta enables searches across the closed captioning content of a growing number of TV programs that Google began indexing last month. Entering a query such as Macintosh will return a results list of relevant television programs with still images and text excerpts from the exact point in the program where the search phrase was spoken.

Google Video beta also offers the following search features:

• Preview page: Displaying up to five still video images and five short text segments from the closed captioning of each program.
• Upcoming episodes: Shows when the program will be aired next.
• Search within the show: Enables searching for specific words within a given program.
• Program details: Offers program and episode information including channel, date and time.
• Change location: Finds the next time and channel where a program will air locally according to zip code.

Google is trying to target television channel moguls and content producers with Google Video beta. According to Google, the use of its new search tool could aid them in increasing viewership by providing Google users with information on future airings of relevant programs.

"For more than three decades PBS and local PBS stations have pioneered the use of state-of-the-art technology to use media to inform, engage, entertain, and educate the American public," said Pat Mitchell, President and CEO of PBS. "Today we are proud to join with Google, a company that continues to achieve new levels of technical innovation with the launch of Google Video, a new service that increases the reach and impact of PBS content."

"NBA fans are tech savvy early adopters," said NBA Commissioner David Stern. "With our partnership with Google on the pioneering Google Video service, we enhance our ability to meet the needs of NBA fans, delivering to them content and information in a new and innovative way."

This early-stage release of Google Video does not include Google AdWords advertising or playback options.

I decided to try my luck at searching video content containing the word “Corvette” and the results page came back with a total of 29 results. When I clicked on one result image for King of the Hill, Google took me to a page that displayed:

• The title of the episode: Ho Yeah!,
• A sentence-long description of the episode: The Hills board a woman who turns out to be a prostitute.
• The airplay information: WB - WB Network - Fri Jan 7 2005 at 7:30 PM PST - 30 minutes
• And a set of still images with captioned dialog containing the search term.

Google makes it clear that the video content is not yet available, but I found very impressive the amount of information users are able to obtain by using this neat new feature.

Google Inc.
www.google.com/intl/en/about.html