Google buys YouTube

There has been masses of comment on the Google purchase of YouTube for $1.65 million in stock.  There is some thought provoking stuff at Geeking With Greg, to choose just one site of many.

Another well thought out piece is Facial Recognition in Videos which considers:

I wonder, however, if part of Google’s technology strategy is to find a way to index and search videos in a whole new way. Google acquired Neven Vision without too much fanfare in August. Neven Vision develops face recognition technology and Google presumably has plans to integrate face / person recognition into Picasa, their photo management and editing application.

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Could it be that Google has also recognized the potential of a true visual search for information - or pictures - or videos. Could Google have plans to enhance the Neven Vision image recognition technology to apply it to video?

That's a interesting question, and I'm certainly very keen to see what the Neven Vision technology can bring to Picasa and other Google properties.  Video search is hard - even more so than images, since the video may cover many subjects throughout its length, so automatically gathered metadata may not be particularly targeted.  The tags on YouTube go some way to addressing that - and by now controlling the largest chunk of user generated video content available, Google have access to a huge training set for their automatic recognition programs.