*What the hey! Really? Dang.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/business/media/18ping.html
(...)
And now YouTube, conceived as a video hosting and sharing site, has become a bona fide search tool. Searches on it in the United States recently edged out those on Yahoo, which had long been the No. 2 search engine, behind Google. (Google, incidentally, owns YouTube.) In November, Americans conducted nearly 2.8 billion searches on YouTube, about 200 million more than on Yahoo, according to comScore.
This startling statistic (((I'll say))) prompted Alex Iskold, the founder and chief executive of Adaptiveblue.com, a Web start-up, to ask in a blog post, “Is YouTube the next Google?” In other words, is YouTube effective as a mainstream search engine, and might it supplant or rival Google some day?
To test the idea, Mr. Iskold, whose inquiry was inspired partly by a conversation with Ian Kennedy, Tyler’s father, about his son’s search habits, performed a series of queries on YouTube and rated the results. Not surprisingly, some searches (vacuuming carpets, Donkey from Shrek) produced better results than others (George Washington, astrophysics).
As more video is added to the Web, the proportion of video searches that deliver satisfactory answers will grow, too. The question is, how far will video go as an alternative to text? (...)
(((I'll go further – having grown up in "creole metamedia," will today's little kids even *be able to tell video and text apart?* Especially if you've got an advanced voice-recognition search engine which can "listen" to video and generate closed-captioning, or that can read text aloud in several languages in real-time.)))
(((User interaction design is melting analog media distinctions.)))
