Google is aiming to improve its search capacity within videos, which is a clever response, given how TikTok’s popularity as a search engine is on the rise. To help stave off the growing TikTok threat, Google released a new test to search by keyword for sections of video clips. Google regularly updates its Search parameters, much to the benefit of regular users, however, new experimental search functionality such as this also presents more nice users, say, advertisers and marketers, with opportunities to maximize their results, especially with Google’s indexing and ranking options. 

Searching…

Check out this example from Google India. As presented in the video, Google seems to be piloting a new test in India that will use video captions, either auto-generated or uploaded, to help users find relevant sections within video clips. With YouTube gaining significant traction over the last two years, it’s only befitting for Google to also focus on adjacent elements that would bolster the relevance of search results, giving additional views to the related videos that pop up. 

YouTube has been developing this new search capacity for some time, first through the addition of video chapter search back in 2021, which incorporates text detection to help identify ‘chapters’ within each clip. YouTube also made video transcripts searchable last October, with this new update marking the next stage of its expansion of automated detection and determination of entities within video clips.

This new test could also be an SEO consideration because the addition of more text-based search tools puts more impetus on creators to ensure the captions on their clips are accurate, which could help improve overall caption quality, while simultaneously serving as a guide tool. This two-in-one augmentative and slightly tutorial-esque option is a likely boon to those just starting their Google Search journey. 

The Wrap

As Google looks to expand this further and index video captions in Google Search, that could become a bigger element for your video planning and strategy. It’s not the biggest of updates, but it is a good one, which could have a range of applications. It’ll be interesting to see how this would influence search and discovery behavior, moving forward. Though it may be small, there’s no doubt that Google will work with what it can to secure its position as a leading search engine, no matter how small the margin.  

Sources

https://bit.ly/3hEjdZW