[tsurantino]

YouTube actually had something like this available for a while (or still does this?) through Caption Search.[1] If a video had captions available (either user provided or automated), one could search based on the captions on that video. Results would return the video and the time associated with that clip in question.

I am not exactly sure why they discontinued the user experience, since it seems like it could be really useful for finding relevant parts in potentially long videos.

[1] http://youtube-global.blogspot.ca/2012/02/captions-for-all-m...

[stephensonsco]

Yeah, good point. We knew about this but the accuracy wasn't all that great. Our algorithm is fuzzy and can find results even if they are transcribed incorrectly (even today, every speech transcription technology out there still makes plenty of mistakes).