Search engines indexing videos HOSTED on your site

[Trivum]

I was wondering if search engines actually analyze videos they find hosted on your site, or do they just grab a thumbnail and look at other info such as titles, etc.

[BloggingPro]

Originally Posted by Trivum

I was wondering if search engines actually analyze videos they find hosted on your site, or do they just grab a thumbnail and look at other info such as titles, etc.

They analyze them the best they can, but its not like the bot can press play and watch the video to understand what its about. You need to place your keywords in your title, tags, and description to give the bot a better idea of whats up.

[Trivum]

I know Google has the ability to "read" videos -- i.e. they could print out a text version of what's being said (how accurate it is, I'm not sure). I believe a few selected publishers on YouTube have the option of including automatically generated closed captions. And of course they can also do things like look at the music to see if it matches something they know is copyrighted.

Just wondering if they would go so far as to do this type of thing for videos not hosted on YouTube.

[BloggingPro]

Originally Posted by Trivum

I know Google has the ability to "read" videos -- i.e. they could print out a text version of what's being said (how accurate it is, I'm not sure). I believe a few selected publishers on YouTube have the option of including automatically generated closed captions. And of course they can also do things like look at the music to see if it matches something they know is copyrighted.

Just wondering if they would go so far as to do this type of thing for videos not hosted on YouTube.

It does appear that they can "read" the videos if your video has a transcript file attached, however, none of the information I've found indicates this kind of "read" is done outside of Youtube videos.

[Trivum]

I don't think you need to attach a transcript. I found the following (which I believe I had read before, and this is where I got the idea that Google could do this type of thing):

With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube's Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed.

Official Google Blog: "In their own words": political videos meet Google speech-to-text technology