The new Google Video service enables users to search the content of television programs from some TV content providers including PBS, the NBA, Fox News, and C-SPAN, among others.
"What Google did for the web, Google Video aims to do for television," said Larry Page, Google co-founder and president of Products. "This preview release demonstrates how searching television can work today. Users can search the content of TV programs for anything, see relevant thumbnails, and discover where and when to watch matching television programs. We are working with content owners to improve this service by providing additional enhancements such as playback."
The Google Video beta enables users to search across the closed captioning content of a growing number of TV programs that Google began indexing in December, 2004. Entering a query such as (iPod) will return a list of relevant television programs with still images and text excerpts from the exact point in the program where the search phrase was spoken. Google Video offers these additional search features:
Preview page: Displays up to five still video images and five short text segments from the closed captioning of each program.
Upcoming episodes: Shows when the program will be aired next.
Search within the show: Enables searching for specific words within a given program.
Program details: Offers program and episode information including channel, date and time.
Change location: Finds the next time and channel where a program will air locally according to zip code.
This early-stage release of Google Video does not include Google AdWords advertising or playback options.
