Search is becoming more and more an infrastructure necessity and in some areas, and for some users, considered a commodity. However, the evolution of new areas for use of search is growing rapidly both on the web and within the enterprises. Google’s recent acquisition of YouTube is giving us one example of new areas. To search in video material is not simple and I believe we have just seen the very early stage of this new technique.

I am participating in an EU funded project – RUSHES. The project is within the 6th framework program. The aim of the project is among other things to develop techniques for automatic content cataloguing and semantic based indexing. So what impact will this have for the end users and search in video ?

Well, they won’t have to go to a category and search under for example “News and politics”, instead the users will be able to use keywords such as “president” and “scandals” to get clips about Nixon and the Watergate saga. The content provider, on the other hand, won’t have to see the video clip in order to annotate and meta tag it, they will just run the video through a “RUSHES” module and the program will handle the rest. These new scenarios in combination with the semantic web (Web 2.0), will enable new possibilities and business opportunities which we have not even dreamt of before! Like search in video!