This is a pretty neat concept. The service indexes video and closed captioning text to allow you to search for specific words and see what show they were mentioned in. It allows you to “search a growing archive of televisted content – everything from sports to dinosaur documentaries to news shows”. Right now the list of participating channels is very small – some “Big Three” affiliates, PBS and some news channels. It’s rather interesting to play around with, though. The most useful piece of this is the “About this show” result that appears on the left side of the page when you look at the details of a search result. It’s like a Google version of TV Guide, providing you with information about when the show airs and when/where to find upcoming episodes.
I’m curious to see how Google’s accuracy and technical supremecy hold up as it broadens its search offerrings. Google’s “claim to fame” has always been the accuracy of results as they’re ranked based on how many other people on the Internet link to the same content. With services like this (or their corporate search servers and desktop search tool) this is no longer a “silver bullet” for them. If I’ve got a word processing document stored on a file share somewhere in corporate America, there is no concept of “linking” to that document. How does the search service rank the result to show me which document is the best bet for my search on “foo”?
This means Google has to play the game the old-fashioned way – by indexing the content and trying to figure out based on the composition of the content which search results are more relevant. While I see that it’s unlikely other search engines on the ‘net will figure out a way to beat Google on technical merit with Internet search results, I see the corporate search market and areas like multimedia search being open to anyone with the next big “idea”.