Google is the undisputed ruler of search in a World Wide Web filled with blue links and black text. After all, it controls more than 51% of the search market, and its share continues to grow steadily. But as Web content becomes more multimedia-based, Google cannot afford to rest on its laurels.
While Google's (GOOG) complicated algorithms have allowed it to excel in text search, it has lagged in an ability to index and find multimedia files based on their audio and image content—a specialty for a new crop of video-search engines. Google's homegrown video offering, Google Video, ranks fifth in the online video space, according to an August, 2006, comScore report. That's behind Yahoo! (YHOO) Video, News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace, YouTube, and MSN video.
Jefferies & Co. analyst Youssef Squali says that while Google dominates text search, the video arena is still anybody's game. "To me, the next area of search that could be the differentiator could be things that are not text-based, such as voice or video search or image search," says Squali. "There is no clear winner in those new areas yet."
AD PARKING LOT. But Goggle appears to be vying for the title. Witness its Oct. 9 acquisition of video-sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion. In a press conference after the YouTube acquisition was announced, Google co-founder Sergey Brin acknowledged as much, saying: "One of the keys to having a comprehensive search experience is to have a great search over video." (See BusinessWeek.com, 10/10/06, " YouTube's New Deep Pockets.")
The YouTube acquisition does go a long way toward enhancing Google's video-search ability. It gives Google a massive amount of content to index and in which to park ads. The purchase also provides a large audience that will naturally gravitate to Google's search, assuming it can deliver the results they crave.
But buying YouTube does not decide the contest. Google acknowledges that its video search is still getting off the ground. "I think we are at the early stages of this today," says Peter Chane, group business product manager for Google video. "I think over time you will see us do more."
GETTING INSIDE. To date, Google searches video using titles and descriptions provided by content owners. For example, a search for "Lonely Girl 15," a much-talked-about video series launched on the Web, retrieves videos "tagged" with "lonely girl 15" by users. While searching in this way works much of the time, it can falter when content providers do not clearly or accurately describe their videos or, worse, misrepresent their content in an effort to drive more traffic, says Suranga Chandratillake, CEO of video-search engine blinkx. "People will put a tag on something that they know is relevant right now, even though it doesn't have anything to do with their video, to get it seen by more viewers," says Chandratillake. "The more you can give the computer the ability to recognize what is in the video, the better the search results."
Blinkx gets around this problem by including voice and picture-recognition technology, in addition to studying user-provided tags, in searches. Thus, a search for a topic such as "U.S. diplomacy" on blinkx would bring up both videos where the user indicated the clip was about U.S. diplomacy and where the words "U.S." or "diplomacy" were spoken. The site also employs facial recognition technology that can identify between 500 and 1,000 famous faces, says Chandratillake. As a result, a search for "George W. Bush" would return results where George Bush is mentioned in the tags or in conversation, or where his face appears.
Blinkx also launched a test of a new feature on Oct. 10 that lets it show search results with a wall of videos. Scrolling over the videos reveals textual information about the video. Google's search engine returns results in rows with attached links, similar to the way it returns text search information. Blinkx is trying to patent the "wall" interface.
SPEECH RECOGNITION. PodZinger, another video-search engine, also uses speech recognition to identify videos. It has a program that "listens" to the audio in video files and provides a transcript that the search engine can then comb for words and sentences. It currently indexes most "podcast" videos intended for portable devices and is expanding to other types of video on the Web. PodZinger CEO Alex Laats says that the technology is able to properly index videos vaguely tagged as "cool video" or "check this out." It also enables searchers to find specific conversations in the video, a feature that will become more important as longer form videos go to the Web.
Laats says that the feature also lets advertisers better target online ads. Instead of buying space on a page with videos, the service lets advertisers theoretically peg their content to particular words or phrases in the video. For example, an advertiser could buy a key word such as "sneakers" and then have his video appear any time dialogue in a video centered on sneakers—regardless of how the video owners described the piece. "Google is coming so far into the game, but they don't have a solution for all the data that comes with advertising," says Laats.
Google, however, is working toward that solution. In August, the company purchased Neven Vision, a company that specializes in face recognition for photos. On an Aug. 15 post on Google's blog, Adrian Graham, product manager for Google's Picasa photo-sharing service, wrote that the technology could someday be used to detect people, places, and objects in photos. From photos, it's not a big leap to video.
FUTURE SEARCH. Google's Chane says that he sees a future where Google can search within videos for particular images or conversations. However, getting to that future will not be easy. "One of the main challenges is that video is very information-rich," says Chane. "You want to search what people are saying in the video. Right now videos are represented as objects which you really can't search into."
Some of Google's competitors in video search are very close to that future, if not already there. And many are sharing their technology with Google's biggest rivals. Microsoft (MSFT) has struck a deal to use Blinkx video-search technology. Similarly, search engine Lycos is also using Blinkx to find videos on its user-generated video site. PodZinger has agreements with leading video blog Rocketboom and other video sites.
There are also YouTube competitors that have been steadily improving their video-search capabilities (see BusinessWeek.com, 8/23/06, "Online Video: Tasty Takeover Targets?"). Metacafe, for example, uses both video-fingerprinting technology and a team of 100,000 volunteer video reviewers to properly index videos and remove duplicates. The technology can add a lot to search by ensuring that the system isn't slowed down by dozens of duplicate videos tagged with different data. It also enables the best videos to rise to the top by preventing ratings for the same video from becoming fragmented, says Metacafe CEO and co-founder Arik Czerniak. "There is only one file that can generate views and comments and it has a single rating in the system."
GLORY TO THE GUIDES. Other search engines are employing the idea of social search to help properly identify and sort videos. ChaCha, a social-search engine founded in late 2005, has a community of 10,000 guides to help find content—both in textual and video formats. The guides, who use an application that combines various search engines and popular sites, are paid $5 per search hour and receive accolades in the ChaCha community based on their search prowess. ChaCha President Brad Bostic says adding the human element helps properly identify videos that are mistagged or vaguely titled. Every search is then indexed and put into the community for future reference, helping other searchers with similar queries better locate videos.
Even with the competition, however, some are confident that Google can combine YouTube's popularity with its own brains to become the video-search leader. Tim Boyd, a research analyst at Caris & Co., says Google will not be unseated from its search throne anytime soon. "They know they are the technology leader in terms of searching and bookmarking, and tagging," says Boyd. "What they didn't have was scale."
Boyd says YouTube's scale will enable Google to move more aggressively into video search and better develop its technology. In Boyd's eyes, the combination of YouTube and Google video means everyone who wants to put video content on the Web will have to talk to Google. And, having the agreements to show and index the video is half the battle in search. "The whole idea is Google wants to become the center of the digital universe," says Boyd. "They will be able to do it. It's just a question of time."
Holahan is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York
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