How Can Video Sites Get Into Google Universal Search?
Since Google has launched its Universal Search in May 2007, we have experienced video snapshots in the search list for several searches e.g. ‘Shrek’ ‘RHCP’ ‘Twin Peaks’
Most of these snapshots are still from YouTube, Google Video or even Metacafe. But there are a good bunch of video sharing sites (even vertical video social networking sites like ones specializing in how-tos, or sports) that are seeking a way to be included in Google search. No wonder. It could increase their traffic tenfold - hundredfold, or even more in several cases. At the recent Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference Matt Cutts (formerly known as Google Guy) have enlisted some of the crucial video search questions:
Q: (This was for David Bailey, the Google rep.) You showed a snapshot of metacafe.com entering Google’s search results via universal search. How can a video site get included in Google’s universal search?
A: Quite a few sites are already in there, and we would love to open that up more. Factors include things like
reliable playability,
lack of copyright concerns,
no porn, etc.
They’ll keep working to expand the sites that can participate.
Q: Do you expect to be crawling the web for videos?
A: Not right now. For the time being, you could submit your video to YouTube or other search engines if you wanted to.
Q: We have 20-30 videos on our corporate site. We wouldn’t show up in universal/blended/3D search?
A: Not right now, but you could always submit your videos to the different engines.
Q: What future plans do you have to extract text from audio or video?
A: Everyone was silent for a while. David Bailey of Google gave the only reasonable answer that most search engine employees can give when you ask about future plans: we have researchers that work on such projects, but we have nothing to announce at this time.
Q: What are your three best optimization tips for video?
A: (various panelists answered.)
1. Choose a good title that describes your video
2. Tim Mayer from Yahoo mentioned exploring MediaRSS.
3. Erik Collier from Ask said “Make a kick-ass video.” Well-said, and a good reminder that compelling content makes optimization much easier
But there is a more that could be done to optimize video for search.
It’s hard not to notice that Matt’s list is 90% focusing on Video Search Optimization while the topic of the session was meant to be a general conversation on Google Universal Search (also referred to as blended search unofficially, and 3D search based on Ask.com’s term for its own mixed media search). The Google rep said that “most people probably care about well-known types of data like news, video, local, etc.” and SES participants cared most about video as this seems to be in a blurry phase yet.