MetaVid is an open source project from the University of Santa Cruz that allows users to keyword search EVERY word spoken (aka transcript search) on the floors of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate and then listen to the audio and/or watch the video. In this case, the text transcript comes from the closed captioning associated with each file. More on the technology here and searching here. From what we can tell, the index dates back to January, 2006. The MetaVid FAQ is also worth a read. Boolean and other advanced features are available and documented on this MySQL page.

+ Files can be viewed online and download (if desired)
+ Search terms can be set-up an an RSS feed.
+ An advanced search interface is also available

What’s New?
The Metavid home page now contains lists of the most popular search terms and most popular people being searched for using their database.

Here’s the most current list:

Popular Searches:
* war
* iowa
* Sam Brownback
* 4-11-2007
* April+11+2007
* April 11 2007
* minutemen
Interesting to note (but hardly a surprise) that these top searches are for a single term in a database containing millions of terms.

Popular People:
* Rep. Michael T. Mccaul
* Rep. Peter A. Defazio
* Sen. Jim Demint
* Rep. John Yarmuth
* Rep. Leonard L. Boswell
* Sen. Maria Cantwell
* Sen. Ted Stevens

See Also: Metavid Pages are Also Linked to Congressional Profiles from GovTrack.US.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 1:29 am and is filed under Access to Information, Government Documents and Political Information, Lists and Rankings, Multimedia Search, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.