Internet search engine giant Google has unveiled a new service that lets users search television programs, including news stories from local television stations, FOX News, C-SPAN and PBS from their desktops.
Google Video is intended to do for television what Google’s ubiquitous search engine has done for the Web: give users a convenient way to search news stories and television programming on topics of interest.
The television search capability is up and running in a beta version. A search for “life on Mars” turned up news stories from KRON-TV, KNTV-TV and KTVU-TV on last week’s story about the presence of methane in the Martian atmosphere and whether or not it indicates life exists on the red planet. It also turned up a hit from the soap opera “One Life to Live” (“Lindsay: do you know how much my life would improve If the two of them would just move to, oh, I don't know, Mars?”) on the first page of search results.
Currently, the service offers thumbnail still images of video with time stamps and content from closed captioning that Google began indexing in December 2004.
Among the search highlights:
- A preview page displaying up to five still video images and five short text segments from the closed captioning of each program;
- Upcoming episodes showing when the program will be aired next;
- Search within the show, enabling searches for specific words within a given program;
- Program details, offering program and episode information including channel, date and time;
- Change location, finding the next time and channel where a program will air locally according to zip code.
For more information, visit www.google.com/video.
