New Google tools for webmasters: Video Sitemaps

Google Video team joined the Sitemaps to introduce Video Sitemaps, allowing an XML submission of video assets for your site. This new tool will ease your self-hosted videos to compete with the big sites, like YouTube, when someone use Google Video Search. Your video may also appear in other Google search products

(See the full article in Google Webmaster Central Blog)

You can use a Video Sitemap to add descriptive information – such as a video’s title, description, duration, etc. – that makes it easier for users to find a particular piece of content. When a user finds your video through Google, they will be linked to your hosted environments for the full playback.

Google can crawl the following video file types: .mpg, .mpeg, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .ra, .ram, .rm, .flv.

There are already some previous efforts to index the online videos:

MIT’s new CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) “Lecture Browser” may be raising the bar on searching the spoken audio in videos, for indexing. In fact, it’s receiving over 20,000 hits per day – and it is to date only indexing lectures.
Originally funded by Microsoft and first announced in August, the Lecture Browser offers results in either video or audio timeline sections, the section containing the search term is highlighted, and snippets of surrounding text are displayed. The searcher can also “jump” to the relevant section of the video directly from the index, as well. ( Wireless Speech Recognition ..) (Again, Google vs. Microsoft!)

In an interview with Everyzing’s CEO Tom Wilde, he discusses a valuable step forward in letting Web users find the videos that they are interested in – using speech recognition to parse and publish the spoken audio streams, of videos that are posted to the Web. ( Wireless Speech Recognition ..)

As it is discussed in a thread at Webmaster World, it is possible that Google to intend to develop its own such technology.