Google Adds Video Search

A Google spokesman confirmed that the company would be sharing in revenue of videos on its site, but declined to say whether it would be selling other forms of content that are accessed through its search engine.

Yahoo!(YHOO Quote) has offered a video-search function for a while, one that scours the Web for sites that already have videos on them. Kathryn Kelly, a Yahoo! spokeswoman, says that Yahoo! Search contains videos from Bloomberg and BSkyB and that the site has been soliciting videos through RSS feeds for a while. Yahoo is not yet earning revenue from its video search.

Typical of the epic game of one-upmanship that has been going on between these two companies, Google's video search has a twist: It can search closed-captioning tags, allowing people to drill down into videos the same way that Amazon's A9 engine searches individual pages inside books.

Like many of Google's recent innovations, the video search is in beta. None of the videos in Google's database can be viewed yet, but the site gives some hint of what is coming. A video search on "iPod" brings up 256 results, with the results typically showing excerpts from the closed-captioning transcript and accompanying still images.

The Google spokesman said the company will be sifting through the submitted videos and eliminating those with pornographic or obscene content. Google has not yet settled on guidelines on which videos are omitted from its database. But in asking for and picking among videos, Google is taking a more active role in selecting which content searchers can find.

Shares of Google closed Thursday's regular session down $1.48 to $191.45.