Google has revealed it’s latest offering in its information indexing services, Google Gaudi.  Gaudi’s purpose is to utilize voice recognition software and search for words and phrases inside of Google Video and YouTube videos just like Google ordinarily would search HTML text.

This is actually a smaller piece of a larger technology, as anyone who has ever released a video with copyrighted music in it probably knows by now.  YouTube (owned, remember, by Google) scans it’s video library with audio recognition software to find audio that indicates the video might be in violation of copyright law and alerts copyright holders of the issue.  I know this because back when I was still doing video blogs (which I miss), I did a blog that was partially in tribute to James Brown shortly after his death.  I was informed last week that my video, which included a few clips of James, was potentially in violation of copyright.  Happily, the copyright holder had no interest in persuing the removal of my content.

So, those of us interested in SEO (Search Engine Optimization, basically making your webpage as friendly to search engines as possible) have been hearing rumors forever that Google would eventually be developing sound and video search capabilities.  It appears we are seeing the dawn of that new era of search capability.  It wil be interesting going forward to see what this new technologies bring to light, from advanced new uses and benefits for end users to brand new “Black Hat” attacks.