CUTTS: We have a really great question from A in San Francisco who asks, "If search engines rely primarily on textual analysis, how can a site that focuses on audio, video, or other non textual content improve its rankings?
Great question. So, the first thing I would say is, you know, look at what metadata thyou can add. Maybe in pictures there's EXIF, you know, there's data that you can pull out that says, "When was the picture taken?"
So, if somebody is searching for time, you could pull that out and present it as either a metadata or a text on the page.
With video, think about captioning. YouTube just recently rolled out some really nice features where if you give it the transcript, it will auto align the text and then you can translate it into other languages.
So, you know, just a little bit of work even if you outsource it or if you pay someone to do it to get a transcript, you can get a lot of value out of that. Also, one more thing to think about is user generated content.
So, think about a site like Flickr. Flickr allows users to add tags to pictures.
And by getting a nice community together where different people can add their own comments or tags on the photo, in a lot of ways you can find out, "Oh, all these people are willing to do this work almost for free." It's almost like crowdsourcing. There are different ways you could think about doing it.
You could make it into a game, so the Google Image Labeler game continues to chug along very strongly.
There are people who show up and like to play possibly for hours at a time with other peoptrying to say, "Oh, the things in this picture are a tree and a building and a video camera and a Mac computer," or something like that.
And so, if you could find some creative ways where your users enjoy it that they'll do some work for you, that can be a fantastic way.
Google will continue to try to understand images and to try to understand video better.
But that's very hard. That's a tough problem.
So any metadata, or user-generated content, or easy ways where more people can sort of label images, all of those will help.