Last year some friends and I visited Wisconsin for a wedding and had a couple days to kill. What to do? The groom recommended some spots to visit, a certain cheese factory in particular, but the websites I found weren't very helpful; just a few pictures and descriptions, not enough to really give the flavor of the place. In other words (you'd better sit down for this), this was an instance in which the Web didn't have the information I needed.
But the night we arrived, I turned on the TV in my hotel room, started flipping channels, and was idly watching some travel show when a thought hit me: surely someone, somewhere must have produced a travel show episode about Wisconsin, maybe even about that cheese factory. But of course there was no way to find it.
Soon there will be. Google Video is a new product that enables you to search an index of transcripts from recent TV programs. It's just an early-stage beta product at this point; you'll only see stills and text snippets from shows that match your search terms, and you can only search shows from a few channels, dating back to December, 2004, when we started compiling the index. But we'll be steadily improving Google Video in the months to come, so as they say in the TV biz, stay tuned.
Oh, and by the way, the cheese factory was really cool.
John Piscitello
Product Manager
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