Animesh Pathak's Crazy Ideas

Friday, February 10, 2006

Next step for google video

The google videos site is super cool, and a lot of you are going to it nowadays to see zany, funny and cool videos.

However, the searchability is not so good. For example, I may have looked for the song "My name is Anthony Gonzalvez", only to not find it but then later find it with the "Amar Akbar Anthony" tag.

So, there is a problem, too little meta-text... uploaders do not have too much time to type.

But viewers do... and that brings us to my next idea: Improving google videos using public editing.

In short, google should let people post comments/annotations to the videos they see on google videos -- I am sure people would not mind typing out while they are seeing a video.. and that will help boost the metadata to search the video with.

Of course, there can be malicious uses of this "wiki" method, to which I propose 2 solutions:
1. Allow only people with Google IDs to post. This limits spamming and violators stand to lose their accounts!
2. Better still, when someone searches, allow them to search from "uploader's tags" or "complete text" using a radio button next to the search-box. Simple.

So.. what say? [are Page and Brin listening?]
-A