Google Video Enables Users to Search TV Content From PBS, the NBA, Fox News, C-SPAN, and Others

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -Jan. 25, 2005- Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG) today announced the availability of Google Video, a new service that enables users to search the content of television programs from leading TV content providers including PBS, the NBA, Fox News, and C-SPAN, among others. This announcement demonstrates Google's commitment to creating innovative technologies that provide access to a greater diversity of the world's information.

"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 (http://www.google.com/video) 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.

For television channels and content producers, Google Video can increase viewership by providing Google users with information on future airings of relevant programs.

"For more than three decades PBS and local PBS stations have pioneered the use of state-of-the-art technology to use media to inform, engage, entertain, and educate the American public," said Pat Mitchell, President and CEO of PBS. "Today we are proud to join with Google, a company that continues to achieve new levels of technical innovation with the launch of Google Video, a new service that increases the reach and impact of PBS content."

"NBA fans are tech savvy early adopters," said NBA Commissioner David Stern. "With our partnership with Google on the pioneering Google Video service, we enhance our ability to meet the needs of NBA fans, delivering to them content and information in a new and innovative way."

This early-stage release of Google Video does not include Google AdWords advertising or playback options. For more information, please visit .

Are you against the rel="nofollow" attribute? Join the NoNoFollow group and add one of these images to your blog:

Did you know that Wikipedia already implemented the rel="nofollow" attribute on all their external links? What do you think about it? Maybe spammers will stop inserting spam links on Wikipedia pages...

weblog.cemper.com has some good thoughts about this initiative, defined by the NONOFOLLOW-group:

12 Reasons against nofollow:

1. nofollow does not prevent comment spam
2. nofollow is semantically incorrect
3. nofollow harms the connections between web sites
4. nofollow is not useful for humans, just for search engines using PageRank or similar a technique
5. nofollow could be used to shut web sites out
6. nofollow discriminates legitimate users as spammers
7. nofollow heists commentators' earned attention
8. nofollow will not stop comment spam
9. nofollow could be used to further discriminate weblogs
10. nofollow prevents the Web from being a web
11. nofollow eliminates the dissemination of free speech
12. nofollow was developed in privacy with only search engines companies taking part in the discussion

PR Weaver supports the No-NoFollow group :-)

Google has hired a lead developer of Firefox. Ben Goodger has been intimately involved with many facets of FireFox since its inception, and also worked previously on Netscape back in the more productive days of the AOL/Netscape cabal.

Ben Goodger said:

As of January 10, 2005, my source of income changed from The Mozilla Foundation to Google, Inc. of Mountain View, California. My role with Firefox and the Mozilla project will remain largely unchanged, I will continue doing much the same work as I have described above - with the new goal of successful 1.1, 1.5 and 2.0 releases. I remain devoted full-time to the advancement of Firefox, the Mozilla platform and web browsing in general. I'm sure you have many questions. While I will be spending more time at Google, I will work out of the Mozilla Foundation offices regularly as the need arises. For all questions regarding Google, I ask that you contact Google directly, rather than myself.

About Ben Goodger:

My name is Ben Goodger...

... I am 24 years old...

I was born in London, England - but spent most of my life in Auckland, New Zealand.

I live in Campbell, California.

I work for The Mozilla Foundation and am the lead engineer on the Firefox browser project. Some of the key areas in the browser I am responsible for include: the Extension system, Software Update, Preference Migration for IE, Opera, Seamonkey, Netscape 4, etc, Windows shell integration, the new Download system, the new Options UI, the new permission manager UI for things like popup blocking and XPInstall and the Windows Install Wizard. Of the code that originates from the Mozilla Suite I was the original author of the buggy bookmarks manager UI (much improved by folk like Pierre, Vlad and Myk in Firefox but still buggy), save-page-with-images (much improved by other contributors since the original version), and the original Classic theme upon which much of Qute and later Winstripe were based. I have done a significant amount of UI design both for features I have implemented and those implemented by others. I have done a large chunk of the project management of the project, tracking bugs and scheduling milestones, have in the past maintained the project and product home pages, began the first serious and successful attempt to market the product in April 2003, and have acted as a liason between various contributing groups. Outside of cvs.mozilla.org I also maintain the Magpie extension which is a set of downloading utilities.

I used to work for America Online/Netscape and have contributed to a number of their products (Netscape 6, 6.1, 6.2, 7.0, 7.1) before the demise of Netscape browser development in July 2003.

I graduated from The University of Auckland in May 2003 with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Systems Engineering.

Google has launched silently . Google Video enables you to search a growing archive of televised content – everything from sports to dinosaur documentaries to news shows.

Just type in your search term (for instance, ) or do a more advanced search (for instance, ) and Google Video will search the closed captioning text of all the programs in our archive for relevant results. Click on a program title on your results page and you can look through short snippets of the text along with still images from the show. Visit the "" side panel to learn when this show will air next.

Right now Google's just testing this product, so you'll find programs only from a limited number of channels, which Google has been indexing since late December 2004. You can expect to see more and more content as Google continues to add new channels.

Example of video result page (click to enlarge):

Example of video result preview (click to enlarge):

Yahoo! has added a Video Search tab on the front page of Yahoo!, making it easier to find and use:

Of course it's also integrated into tabs on

According to Andy Volk (Video Search Product Manager): we may see more content coming from Yahoo!'s growing list of feed partners, which includes Real Networks, AtomFilms, and IFILM. In addition, you can already find video content that Yahoo! has indexed thanks to content publishers adopting .

Yahoo!'s newest feed partner is TVEyes who will allow them to index closed captioned broadcast video content not previously available online, enabling you to "search inside the video." Their sources include broadcast video from Bloomberg, BBC, and BSkyB--that's just for starters.

The MSN Portal team had a “little” launch early last week; they added the ability to read RSS (and Atom) feeds on the My MSN page. Users can add an individual blog’s feed or an RSS search feed or an MSN Search Results feed (MSN provides RSS feeds of search results pages).

They also launched a site for listing all of the available MSN RSS feeds – right now, there are feeds for MSN Music, MSN Autos and MSNBC with more to come.