Google and video search
Google has been making video available for several weeks now.
The service evolved from free videos to a mix of free and paid:
http://video.google.com
The service has its own blog – http://googlevideo.blogspot.com – and its own discussion board:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Labs-Google-Video
‘Rubber meets the road’ questions about how to use Google’s service and how to add your own videos to it is available here:
http://video.google.com/support
Most interesting to me about all this is the search question.
How do you search video?
Currently, search engines ‘read’ the text that make up web
pages, including links to and from, to evaluate what they’re
about and then rank them by relevance. Google’s superior ability
to do this and its ability to create a winning pay-per-click model
is what’s made it into the financial and media juggernaut it is
today.
But nobody, not even Google, can search video acontent nd given
the enormous technical challenges involved, I think it’s safe to
say we won’t be seeing truly searchable video anytime soon.
In the meantime, and for the long foreseeable future, what we
can search are VERBAL descriptions of videos, including transcripts
and captioning.
Google is by no means the only service offering video search.
Dogpile, which calls itself "all the best search engines piled
into one," offers it too: http://www.dogpile.com
Searches on Dogpile bring up an abundance of AOL provided video
and AOL has its own video search service.
Can Google achieve the same level of obviously superior search
results for video content that it enjoys in the arena of plain
vanilla web pages? Maybe, but right now, I don’t see how.
But whether they do or not, if you’ve got video now’s the
time to get it up on Google’s video service.
Why?
As I find myself saying over and over again "it’s 1994 all over again."
Remember when you could easily get to the top of the search engines
for just about any term? You can do that now with video search,
especially on Google’s video search engine.
As I write this, a video by my colleague Martin Wales is right
at the top of Google’s video search results for the keyword "marketing."
Just try to pull that off on Google Sr.
Enjoy!
Ken
Written from Toronto, the night before
the first System Internet Video Marketing
Letters Readers Workshop on January 17, 2006
featuring… Martin Wales.
———————————————-
Subscribe to the System Internet Video Marketing
Newsletter by going here:
http://www.InternetVideoMarketingLetter.com
———————————————
Hi Ken,
I must say that there is a product simply Screaming out to be developed… teaching people how to work with and take advantage of Google video.
I see tremendous potential in it and will be working it hard for my next membership concept over the next 2 months.
Thanks again for a great blog (I do think you need some video content here though 😉
Sam
Thanks for that idea. It’s a very good one.
(Now beaming it to a network of ethical Internet marketing content producers.)
As for me putting up video content on this blog… Are you saying that all the links and commentary I’m providing you aren’t enough?
Don’t get greedy on me Sam 🙂
Here’s a belated mission statement:
This blog is about looking at and discussing Internet video in the business contexts it’s being used.
I guess I could snatch clips and put them up here, but it’d be meaningless without seeing how they fit into their web sites.
Producing and streaming video is not the big deal. As we’ve discovered together, it’s become a piece of cake.
The challenge is how to integrate Internet video with the sales process. The million dollar question that suprisingly few people are taking a hard look at (yet.)
Hi Ken
I signed up to your video marketing strategy with Martin Wales at Perry’s gig in Chicago, and have finally got around to implementing the advice and using your FLV player (which is fantastic, by the way). I’m in pre-production with two online TV channles specialising in my main business and that of one of my clients. They will be ready in about a month so hopefully we can follow Brad Fallon’s lead in the UK. In the meantime, I’ve got us on Google video as number one for our critical search terms. Just fanastic to be this far ahead of our competitors thanks to you. Cheers from England!
Hello, Mr.Ken, This is Doug Barger. I was wondering, How do I get my free Google video on my website http://www.FreeMoneyPieRecipe.com? Thanks a million.
Hi Ken,
As I understand it Podzinger.com is one of the companies that is providing video to text conversion. One of the companies that I am working with over here, thamesvalley.tv, is using Podzinger to convert audio/video podcasts to text and make them search engine readable. I think that you will also see Joost using Podzinger.
Regards
Chris.