For Educators

Google Elections Video Search

In this contentious U.S. election year, what information could be more significant than presidential candidates' own words to describe their views, actions and platforms? And what better way to encourage discussion, reflection and debate inside the classroom?

Google Elections Video Search allows you and your students to directly query YouTube political videos for their spoken content. Using speech-to-text technology, videos from political channels are automatically transcribed and indexed. Simply enter a search term to find relevant videos and jump immediately to where your term was mentioned.

The tool may be accessed from iGoogle as a gadget to install.

You and your students can:

search YouTube political videos, including official candidate channels, for any term
play the entire video or jump to the most relevant portions
access transcription snippets of the portion of video where query terms are mentioned
narrow your search by candidate
share your query or the video with others

With Google Elections Video Search, you can move the spoken words of elections and politics outside the realm of the traditional history class. Students can compare and contrast candidate positions on any topic, analyze individual candidates and search within a particular video for deeper insight. Effectively using and exploring hundreds of hours of political video enables students to become better researchers and more informed citizens.

Found or developed a lesson using the Elections Video Search? Tell us about it!

Enter a search term

You're free to choose something broad, like "foreign policy," or a more specific and unusual term, like "liquor." Bracket your query in quotation marks to search for that particular phrase.

Choose a candidate

You may search videos about the major Democratic candidate, Republican candidate, or both.

Pick a video

Videos are ranked not only according to frequency of search term but also date and source.

Play the video

Hover over the yellow annotation with your mouse cursor to read your query in the video transcript. Click on the annotation to jump directly to your term in the video.