Paperclip Marketing

What is now quite a few years ago I worked for a company that had developed a real functioning image, audio and video search application. These were the days of Napster, and piracy was the hottest item in the news. Record labels and film studios were climbing the walls to find a way to close the flood gates that had been opened by the explosion of file sharing’s popularity. The movie industry hired us to put the application on bots scouring the web for illegal downloads of their movies– all using video recognition that actually analyzed the content of the file. Of course, things changed— the economy went sour, Napster went legit (after their famous “Pig Latin Incident“), and the whole world cooled on video search.

For a while…

Now, nearly 6 years later, video search is back in the news thanks to the introduction of the ultra-cool iPod Video.
Suddenly, there is an urgent need for digital video by the ones who really matter– the buying public. Who better to bring it to them quickly, efficiently, and indexed to be easily found than the search engines? Not currently. Neither Google or Yahoo have ever invested in Video or Audio recognition applications to the extent that they may have, especially considering how long they have been available. Instead they focused on meta tags and file names, attributes hardly even considered by their website ranking algorithms. Now, they are all frantically scrambling to quickly put the pieces together and capitalize on the newest opportunity that Apple has created for them.

So, who was the first one to really make a play for the space? Believe it or not, it was AOL. This week, AOL purchased Truveo, and while the Truveo system does not conduct actual video recognition, it does go a step farther than anyone else has taken— comparing some attributes of the video file with certain page elements to index it far beyond simple meta tagging and titling.

Meanwhile Google continues to stuggle with it’s fledgling destination on the topic, Google Video.

True video and audio search is a certain eventuality. It is an obvious progression of Internet search, and is likely to impact things in ways we have yet to even imagine. And, it is likely to happen very quickly as most of the technology has been tested, proven and available for years.