Monday, January 31, 2005

Google Video launches: misnamed and not up to par

Information Today published my Newsbreak on Google Video today. The product is unusual for a Google announcement: it's immature, and it's misnamed.

See the article at:

http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb050131-1.shtml

Excerpts:

It’s surprising to test a product named “Video” only to find that there’s no video to consume. It seems that every page of hits yields the statement “Video is currently not available.” In response to the question “Can I play the videos that Google Video finds?” the Google Video FAQ states, “Not yet, but stay tuned ...”

....

One could even argue that Google has misnamed its new product. Google Video offers a way to search television content, and it offers a way to search local TV listings. But there is a lot more to video than television; one wonders why they didn’t name the product Google TV. Yahoo!, for its part, launched its own video product last week—a tool to search the Web for actual, playable video clips. Perhaps Google was influenced by its rival’s impending announcement. Or perhaps Google plans to expand beyond television, given that Google Images searches freely available images on the Web.

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