Googlers are hurrying to finish and launch whatever they’re working on before holidays when, rumor has it, Google is issuing a code freeze until the next year. We’ve certainly seen a fair share of announcements and new features lately, big and small , and it’s not over yet. A couple of new features, spotted by the Google Operating System blog, are the “Cartoons” and “Slideshows” filters making their appearance on Google Video search.
Their use is self-evident, it limits the search results to just cartoons or slideshows as determined by Google’s video analysis algorithm. In theory, it sounds OK and the filters make a nice addition to the rather short list, which currently allows users to select between “All Videos,” “Full Length” and “Closed Captioned,” but in practice, they fail to deliver the desired results a surprisingly high number of times. They’re not completely useless though, for most searches they should do a decent enough job.
Still, they’re a rather small update for a service which doesn’t seem to be on the priority list at Google. At most, it looks like something it does because it has to, you can’t have a search engine without a dedicated video search, but that’s pretty much it, when it comes to video, Google onl… (read more)