At a cable television conference on Monday, Google co-founder Larry Page indicated the mildly maligned Google Video is going to begin solicitation of personal videos from people who want to contribute.
Google Makes Video Search Personal 
Editor’s Note: What do you think of Google Video Search? Do you think their request for personal videos can give them a more robust engine? Discuss at WebProWorld.
Apparently, this is being done to personalize Google’s video search, while beefing up their Google Video index, giving users more reasons to query the service.
The idea was stated by Page, who said, “In the next few days, we’re actually going to start taking video submissions from people, and we’re not quite sure what we’re going to get, but we decided we’d try this experiment.” Because of this statement, many feel Google is on its way to becoming a major player or host in the growing method of video blogging called vlogging.
They also feel Google Video’s submission service will do for vlogging as Google’s purchase of Blogger.com did for normal, text-style blogging. Are they jumping the gun? Only time will tell.
However, because of Google Video’s apparent impotence when compared to Yahoo Video Search and the AOL-owned SingingFish, perhaps Google is doing this merely to improve their product and not to revolutionize the blogging medium again.
Currently, Google Video only searches for the closed caption text of video provided by their partners, which consist of:
PBS
C-SPAN
Fox News
C-SPAN2
and these San Francisco Bay Area stations
ABC (KGO)
NBC (KNTV)
KQED
KRON
Whereas, Yahoo Video and SingingFish search open servers to provide their content.
By requesting submissions, Google Video can bolster its search index, while offering users unique content with which to query. This does raise another question, however:
Why would someone want to search for someone else’s personal video, unless it has some notoriety to it (Star Wars Kid, Paris Hilton)? Do searchers really want to see other people’s self-indulgent rants? Especially when they can read the same thing on a text blog?
Although, on the WebmasterWorld forums, Hester provides a different point of view by saying:
Video is naturally one of many future directions for the web. On the BBC site (sorry for the duplicate entry, there were no posts when I tried to start a new one) there’s a link about how the tsunami disaster started up a sudden need for videos. When bandwidth is irrelevant and storage capacities almost infinite, won’t we all want to add videos to our sites? Especially if everyone else has them. Google are just getting in there early.
This point is furthered on the same forum by Michael Heraghty, who says:
A fascinating development. This takes us closer to the kind of media technologies that, twenty years ago, only existed in science fiction imaginings.
That’s not to say that “v-logging” is a good, or bad, development. Media is not good or bad, only its uses and content can be judged that way. But I see this opening doors to all sorts of possibilities (people leaving video messages rather than voice messages; etc.).
As for why Google chose to experiment with video blogs, rather than video clips — I wonder if it’s to get around copyright issues?
Another point of view is offered by Loren of SearchEngineJournal, who says:
If Google were to enter video blogging, it would be the perfect connector of the otherwise decentralized worlds of Picasa (Google’s photo sharing technology), GMail Storage (video memory needs to be stored somewhere), Google Video, and Blogger. Google Video currently only indexes the transcripts of certain Google partners broadcasts (and then links to those videos) but should be offering true video search soon once broadcasting rights are ironed out.
Whatever Google Video’s motivation is, the request for content has been made. What’s next is to wait and see how the public reacts to this request. Will they inundate Google with submissions or will this fall quietly to they wayside? A lot of it all probably depends on the where the popularity of vlogging goes.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest search news.
