Reinventing Search
The answer is Audio/Video. What are we waiting for?
Since the inception of the internet, we have been searching solely for TEXT.
With Yahoo we searched, and got all TEXT but the kitchen sink. With the emergence of Google, we’ve searched for TEXT more effectively. And since Bing came onto the scene, we’ve searched for TEXT more beautifully. Do the pretty pictures really help you find what you’re looking for?
Guess what? People don’t just want to search for TEXT. Everything isn’t written down. Especially with YouTube, Instagram, Vine and other web applications, audio and video are at the forefront of content generation. Soon your traditional search engine will be obsolete if a change isn’t made.
THE PROPOSAL
The idea is simple. Use APIs from YouTube, The Echo Nest, Spotify, MusixMatch and others to then display a search engine that once you enter a keyword or phrase, it will then search for audio (speeches and music lyrics), and video (YouTube transcripts) to find not just what people are writing, but what people are actually saying.
Today we believe that Google, Yahoo and Bing can find everything we are looking for. That all the world’s information is searchable and at our fingertips. But only if someone puts it in writing. What is currently available for audio/video search is extremely limited. And because of this, there is so much valuable data that goes unnoticed.
STEP-BY-STEP
- Enter a keyword or phrase in the search engine, just as you typically would with Google, Yahoo or Bing.
- The search engine uses various API’s to crawl specific websites known for having high volume and relevancy of audio and video content. (YouTube, The EchoNest, Etc). For those of you whom may not have ever heard of The EchoNest. Their music discovery software is what powers more well known sites like rdio, iheartradio, VEVO, BBC, SiriusXM and others.
- Once this content information is obtained, it will be displayed to you just as it would on Google. Only instead of viewing text, you would receive audio from music, speeches and more, as well as videos of YouTube and other places, where someone has actually spoken those very keywords or phrase that you searched for. You can then simply click to watch for listen.
Think of it as Shazam in the form of a full scale search engine, and with added video capability. Who knows. Maybe you can add the voice-recognition capability as well. Sing or play a portion of a song you just heard, or recite a portion of a speech you want to know more about. Audio and Video have already proven themselves to be the driving force behind The Best Social Media Campaigns of 2013.
Want numbers? How about these:
- “76% of marketers plan to add video to their sites, making it a higher priority than Facebook, Twitter and blog integration.”
- “More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month, spending more than 4 billion hours watching videos.”
I could see Rap Genius adding a service like this to it’s already highly effective text annotation web application. What do you think? The opportunity is there for someone to capitalize on it. What are we waiting for?
