Ever closer
Google is getting ever closer to becoming the Grid. Today the Search Engines Etc. company turned its eyes to the airwaves and launched Google Video Search, part of Google Labs. No, it doesn’t let you search for your favorite pirated MP3 movie. Instead, it lets you search for a recently broadcast TV show by keyword, show title, or station.
At the moment, it provides a “preview” of each resulting show, displaying the context in which your search terms appeared. For example, searching for firefox yields one result: a segment of Nightly Business Report from last Thursday. Clicking on the title or snapshot sends you to a page with five snapshots from the show (apparently taken from the video stream itself), along with five snippets of the show’s CC text.
Google is hinting that, eventually, Google Video will stream the actual contents of these shows for us to watch. This could be useful to the smaller TV stations that can’t afford to stream their own video news archives like Channel 9 proudly does.
Perhaps one day this technology could be integrated into Google News to provide a multimedia presentation of news from around the world. At that point, the Times will be forced to go offline.
Thanks to Aaron Swartz for the scoop on Google Video, and many thanks to Eric Meyer for mentioning the Grid a few days back.
2/ 3/2005 @ 9:35 PM
Minh’s Notes
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