搜索正在进行
The web was once all about text and an occasional picture, 但是宽带带来了带宽, and bandwidth spawned a boom in multimedia content through which video and music sites like YouTube became wildly popular and were bought and sold for huge sums of money. Yet in spite of all this rich content, the major search engines remain mostly text-based, 依赖头衔, 标签, and 元数据 when searching for multimedia content.
The big free search engines lack a way to search inside multimedia content, something that has been available for 10 years in searching text. In order to delve deeper into multimedia, you need to use a specialized search tool from the likes of blinkx, Nexidia, Podzinger, 或TVEyes. 正如一位分析师所描述的那样, multimedia search is still in the crawling stage, but sometime in the not-too-distant future, it’s going to grow up and take off fast.
从创世纪到启示录
In the beginning, there was text search. We had some keywords and a title, and we thought it was good. 很久以前, text search matured to search every word in a document (full-text search), but according to Suranga Chandratillake, CTO and founder of video search technology company blinkx, 直到最近, search tools also focused exclusively on text. 他说, "搜索 engine technology has always been built around the idea that you are looking for text. In that sense it’s self-descriptive because computers can read text and you know what words are there and therefore you have an idea of what’s relevant. Obviously there is a lot of detail around what is more relevant, but at least you can make pretty good decisions."
克里斯·谢尔曼, executive editor of the site 搜索 Engine Land, who has followed search since its early years, says most multimedia search has advanced only to the text search evolutionary equivalent of 1993 or 1994, 当它看标题的时候, 链接, 和关键字. According to Sherman, "A lot of these multimedia sites that people call search sites really aren’t. They use things like 标签 and other types of text 信息 to figure out what’s out there and refer people to multimedia files. They are not ‘full’ search like we understand full-text document search."
所面临的挑战, Chandratillake说, is moving beyond text search because video and audio may have some text available that could be searched, but that won’t give you a full sense of the contents. "Now, because of the way the web is, there will usually be some associated text. 会有文件, 元数据, and text on the web page around the video or image and that’s how the majority of multimedia search has occurred in the past." He points out that if you do a video or image search on Google or AOL, it’s not really searching the video itself or the image itself. 他说, "It’s looking at stuff like: Based on the fact that this image seems to be tagged with the words ‘George’ and ‘Bush,’ it’s probably a photo of the president and so on."
Other key issues, according to Sherman, are the subtle elements of multimedia content. Humans understand these elements intuitively, but today’s technology does not. “当你有流媒体内容时,谢尔曼说。, "you have a lot of 信息 contained that’s non-textual, 比如肢体语言或语调变化. Is somebody being sarcastic when they say something or are they being straightforward? It’s still very difficult for a computer to understand that."
我们到了吗??
We are not at the final destination by a long shot, but multimedia search is beginning to move beyond simple text, even if Sherman thinks we still have a long way to go. 他说, “如果你看看真正的多媒体, 像视频, audio, or other types of streaming content, really nobody is doing search in the sense of, ‘Let’s get in and really understand this content, 分析它, 并使其可搜索.’ Some companies are doing simple things like speech detection analysis or looking at waveforms in audio and doing similarity analysis, but it’s still basic and doesn’t work consistently well."
相关文章
Viewers will be able to search over 600 daily weather clips to get local or international reports.
8月24日
Agreement brings wealth of entertainment clips to leading video search site.
8月17日