The average Internet user only associates Google with its search engine.  While that is still what Google does best, through the last 10 years Google has expanded its product offering far more than the average user realizes.   In this article I hope to take a look at some of the lesser known Google apps.

GAUDI: Google Audio Indexing

Google has talked about making its videos (youtube) searchable just as web pages are.  Google has finally released an entry into this domain, just how it works and whether or not it can be applied to ALL videos is another story.   For its first offering Googgle decided to limit the videos in GAUDI only to election videos.   While this is useful for people trying to find specific information about candidates, it doesn't show off exactly how powerful GAUDI is.   With such a limited set of videos it is entirely possible that Google algorithm was 'trained' to a degree using that small domain.

The following screen shot shows the first offering of GAUDI.  The image demonstrates a search for the keyword "Bush", and the following video was the first result.

The circled yellow dots on the youtube status bar are instances of the word 'Bush', each can be clicked on to skip to that part of the video.  Underneath the video is the actual text that is spoke.  All the text shown is (supposedly) evaluated entirely automatically.  This can be seen by some of the misspellings in the text.  One of which I've circled in red.   I actually view this as a good thing, technology like this is extremely difficult to perfect.  Different people speak in different dialects, and sometimes basically the same "audio string" can be two different words in two different contexts.   That said, if anyone was going to get it right, I'd hope it would be Google.   This initial offering is limited, but certainly impressive.   After playing around with GAUDI for awhile, I can say that this looks promising.   So don't be surprised if sometime in the (near) future your normal google search also includes keywords found within a video as well.

Google 'In Quotes'

In Quotes has a similar intent to GAUdi, in that it appears to be born out of the desire for relevant information on candidates leading up to the election.   In Quotes works by taking articles in Google news, and finding quotes by the candidates that contain the keywords you've chosen to compare by.  While In Quotes accomplishes this quite well, it isn't quite on the same level as most of the other Google Labs projects.

It is however a good example of a simple but useful Ajax application.

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