Mossberg has a review of video search on the Web.
According to AccuStream iMedia Research, about 18 billion video streams were online in 2005 and that number is expected to grow by more than 30% in 2006.
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The technology for searching the actual spoken words in a video exists, but is in its infancy. So, most video searches are done by looking for words in a video’s title text, or in descriptions or other information embedded in a video file in the form of “metadata” or “tags” — kind of like the embedded title, artist and album information in a music file. Some TV shows stored on the Web also contain closed captioning data, and that can be searched in some cases.
This area is a great opportunity for entrepreneurial researchers in the video and information retrieval community.