Google Video Sitemaps

Google sitemaps submissions now available for video content

[ajazi]

i haven't seen a posting about this yet on WebmasterWorld so in case you haven't seen, Google is now allowing an XML submission of video assets for your site:

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

[ftwb05]

Great find for all those folks hosting their own videos.

Should now be easier for those self-hosted vids to compete in Google video / general search against all the youtube / google hosted content.

[Robert Charlton]

The underlying intent of this appears to be to identify videos as a separate channel, so to speak, for Universal Search, independent of whether they're hosted on YouTube or Google Video.

A Google comment on the blog...

...the video sitemap file gives us information about videos which are hosted on your site. If you also want to upload them to YouTube, you can do that regardless of this.

The Sitemaps also get certain video meta information... title, content location, player location, thumbnail location, whether family friendly, description, and duration... into a standard format.

[a_chameleon]

.
There may be a little more to this new feature, than meets the eye!

MIT's CSAIL Project has created a "Lecture Browser [wirelessspeech.blogspot.com]" that indexes the spoken audio content inside videos; it offers results in either video or audio timeline sections, the section containing the search term is highlighted, and snippets of surrounding text are displayed. The searcher can also "jump" to the relevant section of the video directly from the index, as well.

And that's not the only successful effort out there to index videos via the spoken audio they contain; another firm called Everyzing is perfecting both an indexing process [wirelessspeech.blogspot.com], and a "Jump To" feature that will allow the searcher to go directly to the section of the video that contains the specific words they were looking for.

Ergo:
It only stands to reason that

• The search giant is almost certainly working on it's own version of this technology, and
• Will have a head start with existing video sitemaps, once they've reached the roll-out stage

Just my take..

;)
.