What are the complexities of building a video or audio search engine?
Part of the complexity is speaking of and (leveraging) nontextual information–having humans describe it in some way. I think that is possible for audio and video, though certainly, the challenges are nontrivial. It is a hot area in the academic community, but I would say the challenges in the short term are nontechnical issues. The people who own this content do not necessarily want to make it publicly available or available for searching. We respect that and, until a time comes where there is a business model or some other arrangement where they feel comfortable making the information available for searching over the Web, we are not going to really provide the functionality. There are some personalization tools emerging. Amazon’s A9.com and MSN are using different techniques. Google’s tool is a little bit more like, “Give us information, and we will help you out,” and the others take the approach, “We will learn from you, and then we will help you out.” Tell me why your approach is s
