Video searching moves to the fore
Jinfo Blog

21st January 2009

By Nancy Davis Kho

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There was an interesting article in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com) business section on January 18th about how an increasing number of people turn to YouTube before Google as their default search engine - http://digbig.com/4ydfw. Pictured with the article was cherubic nine year old Tyler Kennedy– the research customer of tomorrow. '"While he favors YouTube for searches, he said he also turns to Google from time to time. 'When they don’t have really good results on YouTube, then I use Google', said Tyler, who is 9 and lives in Alameda. Calif."' Tyler’s way of experiencing the Web — primarily through video — may not be mainstream, at least not yet. But his use of YouTube as his favorite search engine underscores a shift that is much broader than the quirky habits of children. The generational preference for video over text is going to present interesting challenges for information professionals over the next decade, and for the vendors who supply search technologies to them. As video technology becomes more user friendly via web cams and pocket video recorders, enterprises and researchers can make increasing use of video technology to interact with customers, employees, and students. YouTube says that every minute, 10 hours of video are uploaded to their site; think what that will look like when this kid and his peers are in the work force. What’s lagging is the technology that makes it easier to find the proverbial “needle in the haystack” within those videos for researchers. Newstex (http://www.newstex.com/) is trying to address it by providing full text transcripts of the videos in their archive; Coveo (http://www.coveo.com/en/) unveiled its Coveo Audio Video Search (CAVS), a rich media content search application for Microsoft SharePoint, in 2007. As video continues to comprise an ever-larger part of the media in which reference search is done, look for tools by existing SE players and new market entrants to take some of the uncertainty out of comprehensive video search.

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