With the advent of Universal Search, it’s great to be able to include videos as part of your site, in order to deepen the experience for users. However there are some disadvantages. Video is not the ‘flattest’ of items to get information from over the internet – you cannot pick up and filter through knowledge in the same way as you can with text results, for example. If you are searching for information on a product, then finding that information via video entails finding the relevant part of the video, after having had to listen to or watch the rest of it, or having to scroll to and fro to find the bits you want. Literally, information is only made available over the fourth dimension – or over a period of time, unlike flat pages of text, where although the time dimension comes into play, it’s over micro-seconds, and you don’t really need to use your ears and eyes to understand the data as a whole. With video, you have to listen, as well as look, all of which make video, although wonderfully three (or even four)-dimensional in terms of presentation, rather difficult in terms of user experience.

So, Matt Cutt’s very useful blog has just given us some information on how to link to a specific part of a video posted on YouTube. Matt’s example shows us how to access, or come in on the thirty-first minute and eighth second of this video of Eric Schmidt, via the following: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDw3azfZWI#t=31m08s   At the end of this link we can see “#t=31m08s” – which basically dictates the time and minute that you come in on.

In general, for video, the same problems occur for search engines as for users. Search engines cannot make assumptions about the content of video as directly as they can with more traditional web pages. Video data is in the form of pixel data and auditory data, none of which is generally available to the engines.  What is available is the meta-data, which at present is generally in the form of summary data that you can insert that describes the video overall. 

At present, you can also explore options such as closed captioning, which adds an embedded transcript to the video where words are synchronised, in a mixture of dialogue and descriptions of what can be heard on the video. In order to get an extra level of data, it is also necessary to provide material for indexing.   

Transcription adds visual descriptions of the activity taking place on the screen, while deep tagging/ indexing allows the person uploading the video to create a database of points (or index entries) occurring throughout the timeline of the video. This is done via API JavaScript requests from the page to the media player.

At present these considerations could be of interest to companies that spend millions on purchasing the rights to video at big events, assuming that users will be desperate to see footage of their favourite stars, for example. Without considering how to upload and use the correct meta tags to make these videos easier to find for search  engines, and therefore users, purchasing these rights could mean that companies are not leveraging their assets as well as they should. It is also worth bearing in mind that with recession, comes changes in viewing habits – Neilsen has just published figures showing that TV, internet and mobile video consumption has just reached an all-time high in the United States – possibly as more people save money by staying in. So consider your audience very carefully and think what is is they might be searching for and where they are searching.