Google Audio Indexing: Review and SEO Implications
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Continuing its quest to index all of the world's information, Google released Google Audio Indexing into its area reserved for beta features, Google Labs. Google Audio Indexing lets users search for keywords within the spoken content of YouTube videos. While it still has a few bugs, the service's SEO impact should spread well beyond this year's U.S. Presidential election.
Google Audio Indexing, or "GAudi" for short, works by taking the audio tracks of YouTube videos and automatically converting them to text so they can be searched. Results from searching for a user's keyword are ranked based on the spoken content of the video, its metadata, and its freshness. Google's speech research group developed the speech recognition technology underlying GAudi in house.
If this technology sounds familiar, it's no wonder. Back in mid-July 2008, Google unveiled the Google Elections Video Search gadget for iGoogle. This tool transcribes and indexes the spoken content on YouTube's Politician's channel. It also boasts the same speech recognition technology as GAudi.
At the time of writing, the search giant is concentrating on videos uploaded to YouTube's Politician channels. Nobody believes that it will continue to limit its audio indexing to that one area, however -- especially after today's election. While it has proven to be vastly useful to concerned voters who want to discover where the various candidates stand on the major issues - to say nothing of the clever pranksters who put together the "Barack Roll" -- one can easily envision many more tasks the service could helpfully perform.
I'll discuss a number of these tasks somewhat later in this article. I'll also bring up some of the implications for SEO; I don't doubt that most of you are already thinking ahead in that area. Since this tool is still in beta, I also hope to mention the aspects of GAudi where there is clearly room for improvement. First, however, if you haven't used the service yourself, I strongly suggest you do so; you'll need a computer on which you can watch and listen to online videos to get the most out of it. Or better still, just keep reading as I launch into the review section of my article.
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