At Last, a Way to Get That Footage of My Cat Going to the Bathroom off YouTube Once and for All

end of 2006. And here we are middle of June 2007 and it’s finally preparing to test it. Apparently, YouTube prefers the Discworld product-development calendar to the more widely used Gregorian one.

Google said yesterday that it will begin tests of its “Claim Your Content” video recognition technology with media companies including Time Warner and Walt Disney starting in a month, with plans for a wider deployment after that. “We hope to have a better understanding of how this is going to work, not just from a technology standpoint, but also from a policy standpoint,” Chris Maxcy, vice president for business development at YouTube, told the New York Times. “The goal is to have something more openly available for content owners broadly later this year.”

Of course, Google likely has another goal here as well–one more important than simple copyright policing: solving the problem of video search by calibrating its algorithms against a massive database of video content. “If Google gets its way, … video producers will pipe their video into Google, with descriptions, every day,” says Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff. “Every movie and all the DVD extras. Every TV show. Every commercial. Every baseball game and cricket match. Every music video. Everything. And that, my friends, is a pretty good repository to test your video search on. This is just what Google needs to make a video search that doesn’t suck. And since everybody else’s video search sucks, that will be an incredible edge for Google.”