Google has announced that they have started to index content from various YouTube channels. They're starting with the US Presidential election, which is understandable. The new system uses speech technology to find the term(s) spoken in a video, display the video, the place(s) where the terms are used and to allow users to jump to them.
Search is simple - just type in your word or phrase. Up pops a list of videos on the left hand side of the screen, and you can also choose particular channels (in the current example I can choose either all politicians, Obama or McCain). The video appears on the right and there's a timeline, with mentions of the term and below that the keyword in context. Users can either listen to the entire video or jump straight to the part that interests them.
It worked reasonably well. The example that I used was 'Britain'. I'm not sure how the ranking system works - the first video returned was 3 days old with 1 reference, the next was a month ago with 3 references, so I'm not entirely convinced their claim "The returned videos are ranked based -- among other things -- on the spoken content, the metadata, the freshness" However, I got a fair number of results and in general the hits were accurate, though on a couple of them results were far from correct, but to be fair given how new this technology is it's going to take a while to settle down.
In summary - easy to use, flexible, intuitive and pretty accurate. It'll be interesting to see it rolled out across the board.
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