A couple of weeks ago a video of Vice President Dick Cheney from 1994 came up on YouTube, with Cheney saying that invading Baghdad would invite a quagmire. I investigated this on my own and discovered that, while I could find it today via the C-SPAN archives, it wasn't clear that someone in 2003 during the run-up to the war could have, as C-SPAN's advanced search service didn't exist then. The actual video only went online this past July after its first rebroadcast since 2000. Otherwise, a diligent researcher would have had to have sent $30 to C-SPAN to get a copy of the tape in order to check whether there was something interesting on it.

As I dug further into this research, I wondered how difficult it was to find newsworthy archival news footage. Where are the decent sources, and how good are online archives? Nascent services such as Truveo and Google Video have a long way to go, and old line commercial services force you to take a laborious process to get footage. Plus, academic efforts to archive news footage are still struggling to reach critical mass.

Old Cheney Videos

I decided to learn more about archival video footage online by tracking down the source and subsequent YouTube uploading of the recent Cheney video from 1994. New York-based multimedia artist Fresh was the one who found that Cheney video that's been replayed all over the media-sphere.

Fresh regularly scans TV schedules, and figured that the "Life and Career of Dick Cheney" on C-SPAN3 might be interesting. After he caught it on his DVR, ripped it to his computer, and uploaded it to YouTube, a lot of other people found it interesting, too. The video has been viewed more than 800,000 times and counting.

Fresh had uploaded some 35 videos to YouTube over the last two months, but this time he covered the C-SPAN logo with that of his own website. I asked him why he'd done that, because it seemed a bit unfair. He told me via email that he hadn't done it out of malice; it was merely a "mock station identification," much in the way that "The Daily Show" or other comedy programs would do it. Besides, he said, he readily told any news organization which asked where he had found the video. C-SPAN requested that he at least update the description on YouTube if he couldn't upload a replacement video with their logo.

I watched the clips online and took screen captures to understand just how the video was used. Most news shows referred to it blithely as a "YouTube video" (and MoveOn.org ripped their own clip as a fundraising lure). Only a couple of reporters took the trouble to identify the source directly. Abbi Tatton of CNN and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC made clear that the video was, in fact, originally broadcast on C-SPAN. (Olbermann in 2004 explained his penchant for direct sourcing in the Online Journalism Review.)

C-SPAN has been rigorous in protecting its content and name, taking on sites that posted the video of Stephen Colbert from the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and stopping Chris Dodd's use of the word D-SPAN on his campaign site. So what did C-SPAN think about Fresh's use of the Cheney video?

"We want people to actively participate in the democratic process, but those are our cameras, and that's our footage," Peggy Keegan, a spokeswoman for the network, told me. I asked whether they saw any copyright violation, and if they'd taken any action. "No, it was only a minute's worth of video out of an hour program, so it's covered by fair use. But fair use does not translate to no attribution."

Incidentally, C-SPAN did end up uploading their original version of the video on YouTube, though, with a slower frame rate, it's nearly unwatchable. The derived footage is what most people saw, and in most people's minds it became the next "YouTube video." None of the news websites even gave links to the direct URL where viewers could watch the whole video, or even perchance take a wondrous walk through the archives.

In the C-SPAN archives, I found the original Life and Career of Dick Cheney, which said that the program had been viewed 32 times (a couple of days later the number had mysteriously rolled back to 15). I watched the other videos that were rebroadcast this past July, including a symposium at Hofstra University titled Desert Shield and the Gulf War. Before I clicked on it, it was viewed zero times. I jumped through the list of speakers to get to Cheney. At the end, he made a curious point regarding democracy during wartime which I figured was noteworthy, saying that they would have taken the nation to war in Iraq in 1991 even if Congress hadn't given President Bush the authority. Here's the full clip:

The Trouble with Video Search

As for finding other valuable archival video clips, many online journalists are unaware of where to look for important news footage online. While text search and cut-and-paste of text is pretty straightforward to anyone using the Internet, the same work in video takes considerably more time. Most journalists would rather spend their time honing their argument instead of trying to locate and edit a video.

Google's video search is a weak option because it's heavily weighted by the prevalence by user-generated content and entertainment clips, sprinkled with the occasional video ripped from a news network.

"We've come to expect Google web search to be agnostic, not explicitly favoring content from any hosts," said Mary Hodder, CEO of Dabble, a startup that now focuses on video search. "But Google video search appears to be favored to their own hosted videos."

Entrepreneur/blogger Mark Cuban made a similar point in February: "Right now Google video searches itself and YouTube. That's it. If a video is anywhere else, according to Google video search, it doesn't exist. If video continues to become such an intrinsic media type on the Net, how can Google continue to be a leader in search if they don't search other sites?"

Of the relevant top 60 search results for Cheney 1994 on Google video search, all but one of the clips are hosted on YouTube/Google (the other was from Crooks & Liars). None of the derivative clips that aired on network TV were sourced to its respective website; they were only linked to YouTube.

Last week Google News announced it would start to include video in Google News searches directly from news networks. This may have been a response to AOL's re-launched Truveo search engine. Truveo indexes video content from news networks, including even local news stations like WBZ-4 here in Boston (it already has 16,000 news items). It does not, however, group items by original broadcast date/time. Instead, Truveo has devoted a large section of their website to allow developers to design their own presentation for the videos.

There is, in fact, a video archive of at least the major networks, and it has been compiled since 1968, when Vanderbilt University established the Television News Archive. They have taped and catalogued the nightly news every day of the year since then. In 1995, they added CNN; in 2004 they added Fox News. In addition to the evening news, the archive has taped special news programs, from the Watergate hearings to the Presidential conventions, totaling some 30,000 broadcasts and 900,000 individual segments. Large as it is, there are still missing elements: Television magazines such as "60 Minutes," C-SPAN, and local news shows are not included.

A couple of years ago, the VTNA introduced a browsable interface with the design elegance of Craigslist. This main page shows every month since 1968; each click brings up a list of every day of that month, showing the news programs recorded with individual segments broken out (including commercials). This design also has the key quality of being crawlable by search engines, as Marshall Breeding, the library's Director for Innovative Technologies and Research explained. The archives are a week behind, but it still has 2,000 weeks. Once you find a program, you can retrieve it by visiting the university or paying for a tape to be copied and mailed.

Thanks to an NEH grant, the Archive digitized the evening news collection, an effort which was largely complete by September 2005 Unfortunately, that hasn't yet been translated into public access. The video can now be streamed on-site at Vanderbilt. They did reach an agreement with CNN to stream that network's content to other educational institutions. "We're working on agreements with other networks, but those may or may not come to pass in the near term," Breeding told me via email.

Meta-Catalogs Footage.net and MIC

You might have better luck in the near term turning to a commercial footage house. In 1994, John Tariot, a video producer working in Boston, created Footage.net, which became the premier online search service for film and video. There are 13,000 unique users making 15,000 searches a month and 400 "Zap Requests" -- a direct research request sent to 60 archival partners (each of whom pays Footage.net to be included in the directory).

The searches are still rough; there is no ability to filter by date. A search for "Dick Cheney" brings up an impregnable stack of results from the three major news archives (ABC: 2,757; NBC: 2,562; CNN ImageSource: 1,186). A search on "Cheney and quagmire" gives me a more manageable 14 results from ABC and NBC. Clicking on a result sends me to the page with either a transcript or a detailed summary of the video. If I want the clip (to view, or to use), Footage.net provides a form for me to send a request directly to the network referencing the program code.

The site has transferred ownership several times since 2001, and since April it has been owned by Domenick Propati, who had originally come on as a contractor to upgrade the infrastructure a few years back. Propati told me they'll be rolling out enhanced search services in a few weeks. Within each set of search results, the user will be able to further refine the search, such as by date. Also, the service is working with the archival houses to provide video previews online.

This inherent difficulty of storing film and video content, and the inability of any single service provide it, has bedeviled the research/archival community, largely organized around the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). The Library of Congress considered the problem in 1997, producing the Television/Video Preservation Study. One output of the report was the creation of the Moving Image Collection (MIC) project in 2002, a joint project of the LOC and AMIA. This project has been developed by Rutgers, Georgia Tech, and the University of Washington, and at present the initiative is in the process of moving servers to the Library of Congress.

Jane Johnson, MIC director, described film and video to me as the "poor stepchild" of archival work. "Tens of thousands of hours of television broadcast footage, along with the catalog records of many major television archives, are now available online, but search tools are still evolving, and direct Internet access to large collections is rare," she said.

"Moving Image" comprises both film and video, though it may in the future morph into "Multimedia" in order to encompass audio, which Johnson explained was even more of a step-child in the archival world.

The heart of the project is the MIC Union Catalog which will provide access to any participating archive. The expectation is that individual collections, whether non-profit or commercial, can map their catalog records (whether in MARC or other formats) into the MIC. In addition, the MIC will also identify rights holders so there is less difficulty in clearing the use. As Johnson explained: "Educators are able and willing to compensate rights holders in order to bring appropriate moving images into the classroom and scholarly publications."

MIC today is still underpopulated. The one news collection is from CNN, and that's only a subset. As a stopgap, the MIC does list 241 global archive collections, with a third of them tagged as News & Public Affairs in the U.S. Johnson explained that MIC has been in the process of transferring from the universities to the Library of Congress. In 2008 she expects the project to pursue a substantial outreach program to bring more collections into the fold.

I hope, of course, that the vision shared by Jane Johnson, Marshall Breeding, John Tariot and other pioneers in archiving can be realized. We'd like a single system where any user can search through news and public affairs broadcasts from recent history to get a full education about the people and events which shape our world today. It may not be immediately free for every user -- not even Google or Amazon purport to give book access for free -- but it should allow every user to view or listen to them somehow.

What do you think? What sources have you found online or off for archival news footage? What kind of search service would you like to see? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Jon Garfunkel is a Boston-based software engineer who publishes media structures research at Civilities.net.

And yet... how do we put a value on what YouTube has done and accomplished in its short history? By all accounts, the site is spending more and more each month to pay for the huge bandwidth necessary to serve up that many videos. And despite the flurry of deals with mainstream media companies, YouTube still hasn't clarified how it will make money in a certain way. And the Catch 22 is that it can't make money without intruding on the sacred user experience -- meaning ads inserted before clips show or in ways that would actually get people's attention. A banner ad here or a text ad there isn't going to generate much money when people are focused intently on the video that plays.

So when brash entrepreneur Mark Cuban said recently at the Online News Association conference that Google would be "crazy, crazy, crazy" to pay so much for YouTube, you have to take him seriously. Besides, he was the one who sold his startup Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5 billion-plus in 1999, so he knows all about craziness in the dot-com universe.

I can't say with any certainty what will happen with this marriage made in Silicon Valley startup heaven, but I can lay out what I see as the potential upsides and downsides of such a deal. Unlike the ridiculously conflicted "analysts" who gave their thumbs-up on GoogTube to the Wall Street Journal recently, I have no stake in Google or YouTube except as an interested observer and frequent site visitor.

Why Buying YouTube Is Crazy

> Most people who criticize YouTube believe they are a lawsuit away from going under. That's a bit of an oversimplification of the situation, but it's true that the legal situation around all the copyright violations that happen on YouTube is unclear. Sure, the site takes down violating videos when it finds them, but they also generally pop right back up somewhere else on the site.

> YouTube is losing money, and there's no obvious way it will make money at the moment. This is Google's bet that it can figure this problem out and make it work without alienating viewers and participants. The search kingpin has said it won't run ads before videos, and that's perhaps the most proven way to make money from online videos.

> The video quality is poor at YouTube and it's hard to find good content there without watching a lot of crud first. This is the "empty calories" problem at YouTube, where you watch many, many bad videos for every good one you find.

> The Internet can be a very transient place for content, and it would be just as easy for another pair of twentysomethings to start an even better version of YouTube in their garage and upend the site.

Why Buying YouTube Is Genius

> Even in its short history, YouTube now has the brand recognition and momentum and notoriety to be THE place for video online. Just to have all that video in one place to index will be worthwhile for Google, which has the stated goal of becoming the main reference place for all information in the world.

> Right as the deal was announced, Google and YouTube announced major licensing deals with Universal Music, Sony BMG Music and CBS Corp. This possibly defangs the lawsuit threat from Universal, which had made noise about copyright violations at YouTube. Plus, Google already has a legal team together to deal with its controversial Google Print project and attacks on Google News.

> Google has built the premier search engine and the paid search advertising structure, where relevant ads are served up next to "natural" search results, thanks to its huge staff of super-geniuses. If these brainiacs can figure out how to monetize search results, why can't they figure out how to make money on viral video?

> Google is content neutral. If a media company such as News Corp. or Viacom, or even an aggregator such as Yahoo, had bought YouTube, there would be questions about how it promotes different videos and sorts and tracks and pulls them down. With Google, there are less questions about content decisions because Google is viewed as being a more pure computer-generated aggregator and not a site with human editorial decisions being made.

What do you think? Was this a crazy deal that harks back to the bad old dot-com boom daze? Or is this a perfect Web 2.0 marriage that will pay dividends for all involved parties? If you use YouTube regularly, are you worried about the Google buyout or happy about it? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

[GoogTube graphic from PaidContent.]

Some of you admonished me that searching for something owned by NBC like the Olympics video would be difficult on the open web. You also mentioned that TiVo with a large hard drive might become the search venue of choice in the future, that somehow TiVo would include ways to search online and locally through a major stockpile of video programming.

Points taken. But only one of you took up my challenge to actually test the video search engines. Jim Jones of La Grande, Oregon, wrote to tell me that he searched for "Avro Vulcan," the name of a British fighter jet from the 1950s. OK, this isn't something owned by a TV network, it's a bit esoteric, but of course there must be video of this aircraft somewhere online.

Here's what Jim reported to me on his findings:

1. AllTheWeb -- 4 valid hits (all playable)
2. AltaVista -- 3 valid hits
3. Lycos Pictures and Sounds -- 0
4. Singingfish -- 0
5. Blinkx - 0 (it asked if I meant Avril Lavigne!)

Jim said that he was unable to query Yahoo or Google so I did it myself. Google had one result, which looked like a valid video of an Avro Vulcan bomber. Yahoo had three results, but in all cases, it asked me to download the video; that is, I couldn't watch it streaming online.

Underdog search engines AllTheWeb and AltaVista seemed to shine in Jim's test case. So I wondered whether that might play out in a different example. I decided rather than choosing something from the past, I would choose something from the present day -- Groundhog Day. And what better to watch on Groundhog Day than that rascally groundhog looking for his shadow?

I ran a search for "Punxsutawney Phil" (the name of the groundhog in question) on the major video search engines, but had mixed results. AllTheWeb indeed pointed me to many CNN video results, but I had to hunt around for video on the resulting pages, which asked me to upload a video plug-in player. Ugh. AltaVista also had what looked like valid results, but I couldn't bring up a video to watch. Google Video brought up zero results, and the one AOL result I had linking to CBSNews video brought up an error message. Double ugh.

In this case, Yahoo Video really came through. While the search results looked similar to that of AllTheWeb and AltaVista, Yahoo has a special Video Preview section at the top of the page you select. For example, this same CNN video page includes a section at the top with a "Play Video" link that actually works! Imagine that. Using that preview section, I was able to watch the CNN and CBS videos without a problem. Blinkx also had numerous results that worked with just a click.

So what have we learned through our video search tests of the 2004 Summer Olympics, a British fighter jet, and the groundhog who did see his shadow today? A mixed bag. Yahoo seems to be improving, Blinkx has a nice interface (and likes Avril Lavigne more than bomber jets), and Google is so-so -- but don't count out lesser known sites such as AllTheWeb and AltaVista.

This case is not closed by a longshot, so please continue to send along your experiences doing video search either in the comments below or via the Feedback page, and I'll continue to report on the findings with credit to you.

So far, most video search engines will give you spotty results for what you want. You might get nothing, or you might get unrelated video. Worse yet, you might have to use a different web browser to view the video, or install special software as with America Online's video search.

I decided to try out some of the video search engines, and wanted to see if any of them would show me video from the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. So I simply typed "2004 summer olympics" (without the quotation marks) into a few video search engines, and had pretty poor results. Blinkx gave me the most results, but nothing from the 2004 games. There were many more results for the Special Olympics, as well as for the upcoming 2006 Winter Olympics.

Google Video had a video teaser from the CBC in Canada, but it costs 99 cents to view. There's a free clip about an Army soldier who was training to make the U.S. team for the 2004 games, but it's only audio with no video. (The screen shot above is taken from that report.)

Yahoo Video was clogged up with various advertisements that ran during the 2004 Olympics. That is, the search results brought up videos showing the advertisements -- they were not ads that ran on Yahoo's pages. I had no luck whatsoever with MSN Video, which requires Internet Explorer to use.

Probably the closest I got to actual Olympic footage from 2004 was a search I did on AOL Video, which brought up a video called "Olympic Insider: Dominique Dawes," which looked like an explanatory video rather than actual clips from the games themselves. But when I clicked on the search result, a box popped up asking for my AOL Screen Name. After registering for a screen name, I also had to install a special video player from AOL. And after all that, I tried to watch the video and it never showed up.

Now maybe I'm searching for something that's squarely in the hands of NBC, which has U.S. rights to those Olympics Games. Or maybe this is an event that happened too far in the past. This is where you all come in. I ask that you try doing your own search for video using these services, and others I haven't mentioned, and report back to us on your results. You can either use the Feedback page, which goes directly to my email in-box, or you can report back in the Comments below.

Next week, I'll do a summary of what you found, and credit you for your work. The idea here is that I don't have all the answers, nor does any one of us, but together, perhaps, we can find the strengths and weaknesses of video search engines.