I've been wading through a vertitable lagoon of headlines on the recent announcements by Google's new beta providing online searching of consumer video sources, catching up with Yahoo!'s December announcement of a similar service as noted by Reuters and other sources. AOL has been doing this for some time, of course, so to some degree the arrival of Google on the scene is just waking the general news media up to a trend already well under way. What's kind of interesting this time around, though, is how accessible the new Google service makes business-oriented content: AOL is a no-op for most corporate folks at work, of course, so let's scratch them off the list for now. Instead let's look at a search for "dow jones industrials", one on the Google video search service and the other on Yahoo's video search service. Google is clearly going far deeper with its use of transcripts and close-caption text to capture video content in context, with several major TV news sources providing 37 results on the topic versus two results on Yahoo! with no accompanying text and little indexing info. Of course AOL parent Time Warner's content from CNN is not in the loop, nor Microsoft affiliate CNBC's content, but there is still a significant amount of business-oriented content available from this service that should catch people's attention - yet again another march stolen from other aggregator sources. Although the sophistication of this service still doesn't hold a candle to professional journalist sources of video such as The NewsMarket.com from a production use perspective the accessibility of text transcripts promises to transform the usability of video content as a research source in an online environment from many significant perspectives. Add in the effect of webloggers using this capability to point to significant video events and we now have a whole new layer of content fabric taking shape online. The fun just gets "funner"...