SEO Blog

The Google Video Store is now live at the Google Video site, but it’s already taken a fair share of criticism. First announced last week at CES, the Video Store came online Monday, January 9th.

So what’s all the fuss about? Some have complained the store, as well as the video search, returns less than relevant results. Others have pointed out that the overall site contains sub par content with an amateur layout.

For example, from CNET: “A search for the keywords “John Wayne” turned up a 1934 movie titled “Blue Steel” for sale for $1.99, a bunch of interviews with James Garner and other movie stars, and video from a 2005 Long Beach city council meeting.”

From The Register “If, like us, you expected the new and improved Google Video service to rival something like Apple’s iTunes store, then do yourself a favor and don’t visit the store for a few months. Google has done nothing to celebrate its unique access to shows such as CSI, Survivor and Star Trek. Instead, the company has buried CBS’s shows beneath a dismal interface wrapped in a shambles of a delivery mechanism.”

Podcast junkies can take solace in an interesting new search engine geared specifically for podcasts. PodZinger, which recently went live, utilizes voice recognition technology to deliver results.

PodZinger is a stand alone engine that crawls the web on a daily basis, looking for podcasts to add to its index. It operates with voice recognition technology, searching for spoken words inside a podcast and creating a text index from audio snippets. This procedure operates via speech-to-text technology developed by BBN Technologies. Returned results include text as well as audio samples of the podcast, to help users determine relevancy. BBN claims this technology is 30 years in the making.

Alex Laats, president of the Delta Division of BBN Technologies, said, “At PodZinger, we’ve used three decades of speech recognition research and development to enable users to search multimedia content as easily as they search text. PodZinger delivers both visual and audio cues for users to gauge relevance in seconds, eliminating the need to listen to an entire segment to find the right nugget of information.”

From the main site, users can also download audio, or set up an auto deliver feature, which automatically sends podcasts to the user via RSS. All podcasts provided are formatted in MP3 or WAV.

People’s Daily Online reports that China’s largest search engine, Baidu, is now issuing co-branded credit cards. The search engine giant has entered into a partnership with China Merchant Bank to provide the plastic.

The cards will function as regular credit cards and reflect paid membership for individual Baidu users. Most importantly, the cards will provide a method for online transactions. In recent times, Baidu has suffered from a sub-par payment system, and the co-branded cards are geared to tackle this problem.