• BusinessWeek, Wednesday, October 11, 2006 11:45 AM

Google should use its acquisition of YouTube to make its video search feature better. This is one facet of search that its rivals do better, so as multimedia consumption becomes a more pivotal part of the Web experience, "Google cannot afford to rest on its laurels."

Its complicated algorithms have allowed Google to excel in text-based Web search--it controls more than 51 percent of the search market--but comScore numbers say its homegrown video offering, Google Video, ranks fifth--behind Yahoo Video, News Corp.'s MySpace, YouTube and MSN Video. Video, as Jeffries & Co. analyst Youssef Squali says, is still anybody's game.

During Monday's announcement, Google co-founder Sergey Brin hinted that video would become the company's new search focus, but YouTube doesn't make Google's video search technology any better. It does give it a massive amount of content to index and place ads on. It's also an audience that will naturally gravitate toward using Google's Web search.

At the moment, Google's search technology recognizes tags, not images in a piece of video. Blinkx, a video-search rival, is able to retrieve results using voice and picture-recognition technology in addition to tags. It says its technology can identify between 500 and 1,000 famous faces. Voice-recognition technology is another next step. Podzinger is considered to be farther along in that regard. It uses a program that "listens" to the audio in video files and produces a searchable transcript. This enables searchers to glean results based on specific conversations in the video.

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