Google is looking to make searching for specific information much easier. It’s announced it’s looking to highlight the most important parts of videos in search results.
Google can already help you find videos pretty easily. For instance, you can type in “makeup tutorial” and thousands of video results pop up. However, some searchers may not be looking for an entire makeup tutorial. Instead, they may be looking for a tutorial for a very specific portion of the tutorial. They may want to skip the beginning foundation steps and skip to eyeliner. To do this, the searcher has to skim through the tutorial to find that section. It could take minutes and waste precious time. Well, Google’s looking to remove that skimming process altogether.
Making Google search easier
Google search can now highlight specific moments in a video based on timestamps supplied by creators. So, going back to our makeup tutorial example, searchers can skip directly to the section about eyeliner if the creator supplies a timestamp for that section.
Currently, video indexing is only available for English searches that involve YouTube videos. Google is encouraging producers to add these timestamps. However, Google isn’t relying only on timestamps in video descriptions. It’s also having a number of providers add structured data to videos to help searchers skip through the video efficiently.
Some of those partners mentioned are CBS Sports and NDTV, which will allegedly be offering advanced searches “soon.”
When is this update coming?
Currently, we don’t know when this update will be implemented. We should hear more from Google soon.
