Understanding Timestamps, Google Can Show Key Moments For Video Search Queries

Using Google Search, people can get all sorts of information. But if compared to the whole World Wide Web, the search giant can't show enough of everything.

Like for instance, what if users are searching for something inside a video? On web pages, Google excels as its search engine can understand the context of contents, understand elements within images, as well as reading meta and tags.

But videos aren't skimmable like text, meaning it can be easy to overlook video content altogether.

With more people creating video contents, Google as the largest search engine, wants to be able to understand what's within those contents.

According to a blog post by Prashant Baheti, the Product Manager for Google Search:

"When you search for things like how-to videos that have multiple steps, or long videos like speeches or a documentary, Search will provide links to key moments within the video, based on timestamps provided by content creators. You’ll be able to easily scan to see whether a video has what you’re looking for, and find the relevant section of the content. For people who use screen readers, this change also makes video content more accessible."
"Now, just like we’ve worked to make other types of information more easily accessible, we’re developing new ways to understand and organize video content in Search to make it more useful for you."

"Starting today you can find key moments within videos and get to the information you’re looking for faster, with help from content creators. "

Starting with YouTube videos using English, Google Search can include timestamps information in video description provided by the uploaders, to better understand the context of videos, and make the parts easily searchable.

The feature can be seen on the 'in this video' section that shows up under a video snippet in Google Search results. It can show sub-sections of videos in a timeline format, letting searchers to click to jump ahead to that specific portion of the video.

This should allow users to "easily scan to see whether a video has what you’re looking for, and find the relevant section of the content."

"For people who use screen readers, this change also makes video content more accessible."

Google Search - in this video

With the update, content creators can leverage the timestamps feature on YouTube, to give the idea to the search engine about what's within their videos.

By having this information crawled and indexable, Google can jump over irrelevant portions of videos, and send people directly to the section they really want to see or hear.

For content creators, this is definitely a plus.

To leverage this benefit, video content creators should structure their video contents in a clear and understandable way so both humans and Google bots can easily breakdown the format, and give that SEO advantage.

Initially, this feature is not supported outside of YouTube. But Google opened a form to ask video creators about their interest outside of YouTube, and those not on YouTube should add markup to their videos using video schema and fill out that form.

"Soon you’ll be able to find these key moments from video publishers around the world, such as CBS Sports and NDTV, as they add markup to their videos, and we look forward to more creators adopting this helpful new feature," said Google.

Published: 
20/09/2019