Google Voice Could Bring Improved SEO to YouTube Videos

• Dec 21st, 2009
• Posted by JR
• Posted in Uncategorized

As what is essentially the second largest search engine, the accuracy and relevancy of search results on YouTube are still stuck in the search query stone age.  Google ports many of the same techniques it uses for indexing its search results to YouTube, but it’s missing one primary piece of information: the actual content.  With a system like this in place, you’re forced to use boring titles for relevancy and create tag lists to capture related searches.  However, this is all primed to change in the near future.

Google’s acquisition of voice startup Grand Central two years ago has left them with two important things: a unique centralized phone service and a robust voice recognition algorithm.  The first has been spun into the Google Voice.  The second piece of the acquisition is the voice recognition technology, which is currently in the initial phases of a site-wide roll out. The roll creates automatic closed captions,  and is starting with Google and Education channels.

While closed captioning is nothing new, the adoption has been slow.  The caption creation process is an onerous one and restricted to video owners instead of adapting a crowd-sourced solution.  There are a lot of implications here in terms of policing of these user-generated captions, but the wide-reaching benefits of accessibility alone are tremendous.

In a space where content is king, auto captioning will help provide users with accessibility issues more useful content, but will also allow Google to actually understand the content of their videos.  Google has yet to comment on the larger search implications or how it will be integrated, but assuredly, this is a game changer for video search and we’re looking forward to a complete roll out… and also to reading some funny, funny captions.