Google - Now searching about 40 episodes of Pat Croce: Moving In

January 24, 2005 9:56 PM

Google video search. Search transcripts of recent television shows. Catch up on your Judge Judy.
posted by eatitlive (41 comments total)

Huh. This "google" sounds pretty interesting. Weird that I wouldn't have heard about it if I didn't look at metafilter a lot. Must be a big secret.
posted by interrobang at 10:09 PM on January 24, 2005

Oh Interrobang, if it's not North Korean hairdo's...
posted by basicchannel at 10:11 PM on January 24, 2005

I just made a post about it on my site. This is really major, it's not just transcript searches, but they have screencaps too, so does that mean they have a room somewhere with a TiVo farm filled with thousands of devices pulling down video and storing it?
posted by mathowie at 10:13 PM on January 24, 2005

To quote the man: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits.

(Although honestly, bleep is more fun.)
posted by smackfu at 10:15 PM on January 24, 2005

Oh shit, the Focus on the Family idiots are going to have a field day with this new feature.
posted by mathowie at 10:19 PM on January 24, 2005

Well I now know Tony Danza is a 24 fan: "Kiefer Sutherland is so great. I wish it was called 48. Who wrote that joke?"
posted by bobo123 at 10:23 PM on January 24, 2005

I confess, interrobang, I only posted this to help my stock portfolio. Come by later -- we're having cocktails by the pool.

How odd that PBS shows up under more dirty word searches than the networks. Jackie O's tits!
posted by eatitlive at 10:35 PM on January 24, 2005

Video search is also available on Yahoo!, per their weblog entry today.
posted by ubernostrum at 10:37 PM on January 24, 2005

And now that I've had a moment to play with it, Yahoo seems to return more relevant results. Also they link you to the page the video is found in, and offer a "Play this video" link.
posted by ubernostrum at 10:40 PM on January 24, 2005

sigh... You want some cheese with whine interrobang...

Onto content.. I find this interesting for a number of reasons. One of the inventions that the organic information sprawl of internet spurred was mature bayesian self catorgizing search. Sure we had things like Lexis-Nexis in the library, but it wasn't common. Everyone's instinct was to place information into categories. Think about how you organized your email and personal files.

Folders with single keywords. Information only lived in one place and the schemes soon became obsolete.

Then came Lycos and Inktomi and then Google. Flat self tagging data changed everything. Information tagged itself. Data became its own meta-data. Google certainly didn't invent it, but they have consistently done it better than most everyone else.

This takes that concept, and extends it beyond the domain of web accessible information. I want all my data self organized. My bills, my books, my music, my pictures, my personal files, my daily correspondence.

With Google, Picasa, Google Desktop Search, Gmail, Google Groups, Google Image Search, Keyhole and now Google Video, its obvious they have read my mind. I care not about you paro-nuts who are scared of information leakage. Your data is already out there and all nefarious people already have access to it. Google is just empowering you to do the same.

I want real time self categorizing full text search of my entire life. What was that great conversation I had stoned in college about tera-forming mars? Let me look it up in my Lifeoogle. The really funny moment in Will and Grace last night, that IM conversation with my boss two months ago. I want to find it and I want it searched in 0.07 seconds or less.

I want to search it all. Google is not the second coming, but they do understand what is really revolutionary about internet search, and it has really little to do with the internet and a lot to do with ubiquitous search.
posted by PissOnYourParade at 10:48 PM on January 24, 2005

Blinkx also has a video search engine, with actual video (and audio) clips.
posted by gyc at 10:51 PM on January 24, 2005

Dr. Phil, he phurny:


Higher cognitive functions, that's where those this are housed. And that's under construction right now. And every time you ingest R Cannabis, every time you ingest it, it alters the construction site that's going on in your brain. It changes your personality. It changes your reasoning. It changes your problem-solving. And it changes your future. It sucks the motivation out of you, and causes you to accept things that you wouldn't accept but for the drug. Other than that, it's probably not hurtin' you.


Sorry but I kant spel write. Waisted cogneetive funcsons and all that.
posted by daksya at 11:01 PM on January 24, 2005

I believe gyc meant to link to Blinkx.

As I stated, anyone who gets the concept, well, gets it. Blinkx certainly seems like they are clued in. However, I worry about how a start-up can scale. The technology they have seems neat and more mature than google. However, google's strength is that they have built an operating system for large scale hosted applications.

Google is more of a framework and infrastructure for executing ideas than a single product. This, plus their good name and size (which helps in license negotiation) means they don't have to be the innovator, just the creative imitator.

Yahoo search, while really cool, is more of an evolution of a traditional internet search. They index movies already posted and accessible on the web. While this is mondo cool, I think the revolution that blinkx and google are trying to do is extend the search space, not just provide additional paths into it.
posted by PissOnYourParade at 11:02 PM on January 24, 2005

I guess this shouldn't come as a surprise.
posted by dwordle at 11:33 PM on January 24, 2005

This is seriously neat. I lost my episode guide of M*A*S*H so...
posted by bdave at 11:33 PM on January 24, 2005

Oh and Seinfeld is apparently teh funny.
posted by dwordle at 11:40 PM on January 24, 2005

suck turns up jerry springer as number one. the transcript seems like a waste of google hard drive space, though it is classic.

"Did your panties get evicted? I don't know. Did you lose them in their creases? That's nasty. You should have -- audience: you suck! You suck! You suck! >> Want some of me? Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on."

Needs work though: Daily show is worthless results, and Star Trek turns up a weird assortment... the bionic bunny show?
posted by Merik at 1:08 AM on January 25, 2005

I put in "Coronation Street" and it had never heard of it.
More work to do here, I think.
posted by JtJ at 1:25 AM on January 25, 2005

Too bad the transcripts are incomplete, some sound like a good read.
posted by page404 at 3:29 AM on January 25, 2005

Merik- Right now they're only doing a handful of channels, including the major broadcast networks, Fox News, and 2 C-Spans.
posted by ajpresto at 4:23 AM on January 25, 2005

I wonder how the transcripts are generated. Speech-to-text magic, perhaps? OCRs of transcripts gotten out of Hollywood back-alley Dumpsters? Whatever it is could use improvement. From one of the first results for "west wing":

Oynes. 99 2126 Url t2 99 d O L [8 a41] O years ago 0 President right now? 103 99 436F7079636174 0104 99 2126 and worked his ass off. You're endorsing me. 0103 99 436F7079636174 url t2 99 d O L 0 sident endorsing Sam? 99 436F7079636174 99 2126 url t2 99 d O L <http : //>[N: what do you think? Ld win. 4 0104 99 2 126 Url t2 99 d O L >[N: C.J.: Mr. President, how do you of Victory?

But, um, GO GOOGLE!
posted by heydanno at 6:42 AM on January 25, 2005

The transcripts appear to be coming from close captioning. You can tell from the Jeopardy transcripts. There are no "answers", just "questions", because the "answers" appeared and the screen and didn't need captioning.
posted by teg at 7:04 AM on January 25, 2005

Merik: Bionic Bunny is also the show-within-the-show on PBS's Arthur.
posted by frecklefaerie at 7:05 AM on January 25, 2005

This Google Video Search - is it something I would have to have a TV to care about?



Because, um, Yahoo's video search isn't.
posted by soyjoy at 7:52 AM on January 25, 2005

Finally. Thought google was asleep for a minute there.
posted by hypersloth at 7:55 AM on January 25, 2005

The Bionic Bunny Show book was about making a TV show, and for that Reading Rainbow, Levar Burton brought us to the set of Star Trek: TNG.

Google? Smarter than you think. :-)
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 8:02 AM on January 25, 2005

SoyJoy, no. In fact, if you don't have a TV, this is what Google is hoping will bring that content to you on the screen you *do* use.

JtJ, they do have more work to do, but it is on the deal-making side. I reckon they are already indexing much much more than is being exposed here, and the video is digitized and ready to present, once rights issues are hammered out.

This is Google's initial play at being a TV distribution channel now that the cable companies are seeing their relevance reduced to their infrastructure. Telcos are trying to get in on it too -- they've got cables to the home, why not! It's a big deal.
posted by TonyRobots at 8:49 AM on January 25, 2005

In case it wasn't clear, my comment wasn't just for the sake of reprising the "no TV" comment. I find it odd that while video.yahoo.com allows you to "Search for videos across the web," the analogous URL on Google only allows you to "Search recent TV programs online." You'd think Google would have the more all-encompassing search, but no.
posted by soyjoy at 9:30 AM on January 25, 2005

But soyjoy, that is not the more all-encompassing search, that's the more limited search. All yahoo video search really is, is normal search with frame capturing and some filename indexing.

You can already search for the same thing on google, or any search engine really, by limiting your file types to video formats.

The big thing here, in my opinion, is that google is bring new information to the searchable space. Not just reindexing what's out there.
posted by PissOnYourParade at 10:19 AM on January 25, 2005

The text is indeed from the closed captions. And those captioners can't spell.
posted by Aknaton at 10:42 AM on January 25, 2005

You can already search for the same thing on google, or any search engine really, by limiting your file types to video formats.

Well, no, and this is the key point here, you can't. As I said when this came up last week, rafter was wrong about this. Just go ahead and try putting "filetype:avi" or "filetype:mpg" in there and see how many results you get.

So although it's not a big deal, my point remains that one third-level-domain "video" searches the whole Web for videos without restricting to one content type, and the other only searches for exactly one content type: TV shows. That's more limited.
posted by soyjoy at 11:00 AM on January 25, 2005

Google should have called TV Search, because it's nothing like Yahoo's video search.

Yahoo's video search has a some nifty features, like being able to tell you how long a clip is, and limiting your search to clips longer or shorter than one minute. They need more options like that, though, like minimum or maximum resolution.
posted by exhilaration at 11:32 AM on January 25, 2005

I want real time self categorizing full text search of my entire life.
Richard Nixon would have loved this, wouldn't he? But on the whole I agree with PissOn -- anything that organizes my life and makes it searchable (without too much input from me -- PalmPilots are out because I have to enter everything) is the direction I want to go in.

One of the interesting things about this is its value for future biographers. The demise of the handwritten or typed first class letter was bemoaned as removing a primary source for biographers and historians, and in fact it did, for the period of roughly 1950 to 2000 where telephone and later email became dominant means of long-distance communication, and before the ability to store and index electronic communications came of age. I would expect voice mail and perhaps even live phone conversations to be added, eventually, to one's "Lifeoogle" database.
posted by beagle at 11:37 AM on January 25, 2005

Someone did something similar to this, once upon a time ago... I want to say it was called "eye on TV", or something like that. They just recorded tons of closed-captioning info from all the cable channels. You could search it ad hoc, and set email/paging alerts for when your keywords came up.

I think it was aimed at financial investors, who want to know when their stocks are being talking about on CNBC.
posted by smackfu at 11:58 AM on January 25, 2005

I want to say it was called "eye on TV", or something like that.

It's still around, it's called TVEyes.

I hadn't looked at this for a while but it's way out in front of either Google Video or Yahoo Video. Check out the listed products and services. Very impressive, including radiio audio search. Mostly paid services.
posted by beagle at 12:14 PM on January 25, 2005

Also, check out this European project called "REVEAL THIS: RETRIEVAL OF VIDEO AND LANGUAGE FOR THE HOME USER IN AN INFORMATION SOCIETY", in which TVEyes is a partner.
posted by beagle at 12:21 PM on January 25, 2005

Google video results of video about Google Video. My head asplode.
posted by m@ at 1:19 PM on January 25, 2005

if you look at the urls for the images, it looks like you can twiddle the params in the URL to step through the shows by time. however, there appears to be an additional parameter that's used to check for "validity". is that some kind of error correction, or a device to stop direct access to images (in other words, does anyone know how to generate it)?
posted by andrew cooke at 1:39 PM on January 25, 2005

Also out in front: Blinkx.
Free search, streaming video and audio.
posted by beagle at 2:09 PM on January 25, 2005

Ok, so why is this legally kosher but lyrics.ch was an abomination?
posted by NortonDC at 7:32 PM on January 25, 2005

Finally, another reason to think about television.
posted by nanojath at 8:55 PM on February 23, 2005