Delve Networks has just released a little app that uses their video search tech to navigate Barack Obama’s inauguration speech.
The engine is pretty keen. It pulls up all sorts of key terms like America, blood, dirt, and freedom—in short, everything we love in the U.S.A, my brother Adam B. notes.
Still, the engine has some limitations. It can’t pull up any word in the speech, just some key words that are, to the best of our knowledge, defined by Delve itself. You can’t, for instance, pull up every iteration of the word “and.” Aw shucks, right?
There is also at least one very glaring omission from the keywords, too. A commentator from Blog Le Monde complains that while you can search for terms like “Muslims” and “nation,” when he searched for “nonbelievers,” a word spoken for the first time on Tuesday in an inaugural speech, the machine was [notably] silent.” I feel like there’s some played out joke about French atheism in here, but Le Monde’s man has a point.
When I tried to replicate his results, I was unable to find the word “nonbeliever,” “non-believer,” the term “non believer,” or even just “believer.” I eventually found the passage in question by searching “non” by itself. The French paper’s blog seems to suggest there’s some foul play at hand, but at the very least it is a curious oversight.
See if you can find any other glaring lapses and let us know, Speech Heads.

Eric B. —
January 22, 2009 @ 12:24 pm
I have money
Comment by MOHAMED — February 26, 2009 @ 3:51 pm