Google and making multimedia searchable

Today I saw the announcement "Google adds automatic captions to YouTube". I really like this addition to the possibilities of Youtube.

But as we all know Google as a gigantic eposure in all thing they do.

This feature seems a neat thing that makes it easier for consumers to upload there video's to Youtube regardless of language and eliminating the need for adding manual captions or descriptions to there video's: Google converts the speech to text automaticaly...

As i am more involved in information access and enterprise search I place this news in another context: The possibility of making video and audio searchable.

Within the enterprise this issue of making video and audio searchable is getting more attention. Autonomy as well as Exalead are also focussing on this part of enterprise search.

To see the capabilities of Exalead you can visit their labs on http://labs.exalead.com/experiments/voxalead.html.

Autonomy also is very active on the market of media indexing. They have solutions like Virage that to the same thing. I find it very disapointing that Autonomy has no demo of their capabilities.

Bottom line?
Google is doing the same thing as the large search technology providers. The "public" will say that Google is "ahead of the pack". The advantage that Google has is a large community that follows everything that they do and spread the word fast.
Other search providers like Autonomy and Exalead can do and are doing the same thing as Google is doing now (and are maybe better), but are not in the position to reach the audience that Google can.