The Squawk Spiders

We are lucky to be around to see what happens when you mix politics and the Internet. A lot of attention is given to how the Internet changed the way we look at politics. From Sen. Obama's fundraising efforts to Sen. McCain's daughter's campaign trail blog, the Internet is shaping up to be an even more potent political tool than television or radio. YouTube certainly fueled this fire by allowing at-demand access to speeches, but the search features for specific speeches is less than perfect. Google claims to have given that a boost with one of their latest search tools: a gadget that searches political speeches for specified text.

What this implies for the political process is an even more refined way of getting to the heart of a candidate's speech. If you're interested in finding out what Obama or McCain has to say, in any of their speeches, about healthcare you can drag it up from a YouTube video and watch it. The gadget isn't perfect, but Google definitely won't stop there. Once the search feature is refined, which will probably be sooner rather than later given the higher demand closer to the election, it'll move beyond its initial premise of being a political tool and become something more general.

Having a search spider available to look through videos on YouTube does come with concerns, though no more really than any other Google search. When using the gadget right now you might only get a small piece of a speech, not really enough to see the whole of what a candidate is saying. Lack of context is an issue that is still being worked on, but for now a person using the gadget can just follow up on a search with some more focused information once they've watched their clip. By the time the gadget moves from a political tool to a more utile one I am sure Google will add some functionality that will allow you to see a whole list of related objects, rather than small snippets.

I can see this being very useful in research-oriented searches. Lecturers visiting at a university might be passed by in a search simply due to the length or obscurity of their speech. With this gadget applied, it will be more likely that you have an idea of what they're saying and you won't have to guess from the title of the clip or the brief summary. This is invaluable to a journalist of any variety for cross-referencing sources, or even creating a sound byte if necessary. Google's speech spiders are going to shake up YouTube without a doubt, and a lot of users stand to benefit from the improved search results.

• General discussions
• election '08
• Google
• McCain
• obama
• politics
• speech to text
• YouTube