[vijayr]

video search isn't big today, but it'll probably be huge in the future, may be as big as text search if not bigger. same can be said about video advertising. at that time, who do you think is going to have tons of inventory at their disposal? Google

it is just part of a bigger strategy - text search, book search, audio/video search etc.

youtube is a long term investment. as long as G has money to keep it running/improving, they have nothing to worry about.

may be 5-10 years from now, the same ppl would say that the best investment that google made, is youtube.

[patio11]

Video search isn't big today because there is exactly ONE use case for it: [heroes season 2]. Text search works perfectly fine for that -- you type in [heroes season 2], you will find Heroes, season 2. It is probably one of the best single domains for searching -- canonical or near canonical names for everything, with disambiguating numbers that users actually know, and built-in metadata which links all your canonical names together in a pattern users actually understand! Brilliant!

OK, so we've got Heroes season 2. Now we have the problem: do people want to pay money for it? Answer: well, no, not if they can get it free on Youtube. Piracy is Youtube's killer app. Unlike the iPod (piracy is the iPod's killer app, too, unless you think 20-somethings are filling 8 GB iPods at $1 a song), Youtube doesn't have plausible deniability or a convenient way to extract money from the pirates.

[calambrac]

Um, what? You really think the only use case for video search is finding particular clips with known titles? There's an entire industry around stock photos/videos that right now relies almost entirely on manual tagging, you don't think that field's ripe for search? Or the petabytes of video being streamed from security cameras, you don't think anyone out there wants to search that for faces or license plates or whatever? Video search is going to be absolutely killer, and Google's sitting on top of the largest, most varied training corpus in the world, thanks to YouTube.

[vijayr]

what if I am searching for a particular scene (say a 2 min scene), in a particular episode of heroes, in a particular season?

[ori_b]

How can you automatically detect that from a video? And if instead of automatically detecting it, you just let the users tag the video, why does text search not work? Finally, even if they manage to get a useful video search working, why do they need Youtube for it, when they can crawl the web for video?

[e1ven]

Google is working on this- One theory is that part of why they are working on Goog411 is to increase their voice reco engine, so that they can apply it to Video and Audio search.

Google hired several engineers away from Nuance (one of the leaders in voice recognition), and they're working hard on growing their development there.

[vijayr]

How can you automatically detect that from a video?

that is the point I'm trying to make. it is not possible today, I guess it will be possible in future.

how much can you tag? and who will do all the work of tagging? it has to be automated, like text search. video search is going to be much more difficult than text, and G has tons of videos to mine and refine algos.

[RK]

One thing you can search is closed captioning, like SnapStream does:

http://www.snapstream.com/tvtrends/

[jokermatt999]

YouTube has also added a closed captioning feature, but I'm not sure how it is done. I assume this is also working towards video search.