I hate watching the news on TV for a simple reason — you can’t skim. I like to take in news at my own pace, reading articles that are really interesting carefully, skimming others, and abandoning any story when I lose interest. With the TV news, none of those options are easily available to me. Google is trying to fix that problem by letting people search television transcripts.

For a test, I searched for “sarbanes oxley,” and the results were useful. Not bad at all. It also landed the transcript of a recent controversial bit of video when I entered the search term Judy Bachrach.