Streaming Media - December 2007/January 2008 - (Page 46) the search is on From Genesis to Revelation In the beginning, there was text search. We had some keywords and a title, and we thought it was good. Long ago, text search matured to search every word in a document (full-text search), but according to Suranga Chandratillake, CTO and founder of video search technology company blinkx, until recently, search tools also focused exclusively on text. He says, “Search engine technology has always been built around the idea that you are looking for text. In that sense it’s self-descriptive because computers can read text and you know what words are there and therefore you have an idea of what’s relevant. Obviously there is a lot of detail around what is more relevant, but at least you can make pretty good decisions.” Chris Sherman, executive editor of the site Search Engine Land, who has followed search since its early years, says most multimedia search has advanced only to the text search evolutionary equivalent of 1993 or 1994, when it looked at titles, links, and keywords. According to Sherman, “A lot of these multimedia sites that people call search sites really aren’t. They use things like tags and other types of text information to figure out what’s out there and refer people to multimedia files. They are not ‘full’ search like we understand full-text document search.” The challenge, Chandratillake says, is moving beyond text search because video and audio may have some text available that could be searched, but that won’t give you a full sense of the contents. “Now, because of the way the web is, there will usually be some associated text. There will be files, metadata, and text on the web page around the video or image and that’s how the majority of multimedia search has occurred in the past.” He points out that if you do a video or image search on Google or AOL, it’s not really searching the video itself or the image itself. He says, “It’s looking at stuff like: Based on the fact that this image seems to be tagged with the words ‘George’ and ‘Bush,’ it’s probably a photo of the president and so on.” Other key issues, according to Sherman, are the subtle elements of multimedia content. Humans understand these elements intuitively, but today’s technology does not. “When you have streaming content,” says Sherman, “you have a lot of information contained that’s non-textual, like body language or inflection. Is somebody being sarcastic when they say something or are they being straightforward? It’s still very difficult for a computer to understand that.” Are We There Yet? We are not at the final destination by a long shot, but multimedia search is beginning to move beyond simple text, even if Sherman thinks we still have a long way to go. He says, “If you look at true multimedia, like video, 46 STREAMING MEDIA December 2007/January 2008
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