• San Jose Mercury News, Wednesday, June 13, 2007 10:15 AM

Maybe it's what Google intended all along, but the San Jose Mercury News says the search giant's $1.6 billion acquisition of YouTube is less about content than being able to test and improve its video search technology. Sure, content filtering technology is a way to fingerprint material that shouldn't be there--but it also requires that media companies feed Google more video content to be held in a large database.

With Google's content filtering technology, media companies hand over material used for tracking down unauthorized content that Google holds in a database. For example, HBO would hand over its "Sopranos" episodes, which Google would use to flag illegally posted copies on YouTube. Merrill Lynch analyst Josh Bernoff suggests that buried in this news is the likelihood of a Google content partnership with ads--or at the very least, a referral fee for linking to a site where the material is legally uploaded. In other words, a massive database of content would help Google create a more comprehensive video search, likely driving greater usage and more content partnerships in turn.

Google had been using fingerprinting technology from Audible Magic, which tags audio tracks to determine the use of copyrighted material and is used by MySpace, Dailymotion and Microsoft's Soapbox, among others. Google only used the technology to filter music for its record label partners. "What we are trying to do is get this to work for YouTube's entire library," spokesman Ricardo Reyes said.

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