It's 3am and I feel the perfect time to write my first blog post, and I'm wondering how Google will improve its understanding of video.  Universal search is already presenting video results when they are relevant to a query, and slowly, multiple videos are being displayed. Does that mean that Google already understands video, or is it just giving us what they know we want?

Video-to-speech is an interesting area, and it has been slowly appearing around YouTube. Google has launched the new product in Labs and even given it a groovy name and a little logo. The new technology is called Google Audio Indexing, although they are currently only doing this for the US Presidential Campaign.

The principle behind the technology is to ensure that as video quality and quantity expand, so does the amount of information that is visible to Google search. They have already worked to ensure their spiders can read Flash, so video is an obvious next step.

The labs section has an FAQ page which talks about how the new technology works and how it can help searchers. The new feature advises that it can allow users to better watch and search through various videos on its YouTube system, and it should eventually be integrated to its Google Video for Business.

So if Google's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," then how does this affect the current poor levels of SEO focus around video?  If the video is not tagged correctly, can the spiders now understand the content, or will this be a guidance measure to ensure that the several Obama Campaign videos that are all tagged "Obama 08" can be indexed as Berlin Speech, Pig Lip Stick, etc?

I have provided the quote straight from the Google FAQ to ensure that it's correctly stated on how it actually works:

The returned videos are ranked based -- among other things -- on the spoken content, the meta data and the freshness. We periodically crawl the YouTube political channels for new content. As soon as a new video is uploaded to YouTube, it is processed by our system and made available in our index for people to search.

I know that Google Webmaster Tools gives webmasters the ability to add Google Video sitemaps to a site:. If your content is sitting on YouTube, does that mean Google is taking the hard work and doing it for you?

It says that GAudi looks at spoken content, so does that mean if your speech has historical quotes about Nazis that content filters will block it out, or will lecturers be mentioning "Viagra," "Ringtones" and "Get Paid for Adwords" during their speeches to ensure they are getting traffic for the video? The freshness of the video is also an interesting concept, since there are a number of steps that could be recorded or edited to ensure freshness"

• When the video was recorded
• When the video was edited
• When the video was saved/exported
• When the video was uploaded 

So to which one of these will GAudi be giving the most preference? Video is a great medium, but it also seems to be filled with more spam that you can poke a stick at. Want to get more clicks on your YouTube campaign? Insert single frames in the middle, mashup an existing video with music or captions, etc.  All these methods have the ability to take control of your video and splice it, display its context and rank it #1.

David works for thelostagency.com.