The University of California, Berkeley has announced that it is making more than 250 hours of educational content free via Google Video. The collected materials have their own URL at http://video.google.com/ucberkeley.html. This page is divided into several categories including Courses, Arts & Humanities, and Science & Technology. Several videos are spotlighted on the front page, including a course called “Physics for Future Presidents” and the “China-U.S. Climate Change Forum.”

My eye was caught by “Information Systems 141 Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business” in the courses section, so I clicked on that title. I got a list of six videos for that course. Of course since it was, you know, an educational course that is presented in a prepared sequence, Google Video sorted the available videos by date. No, I tell a lie, Google sorted them by title. Argh. (You can sort content by date, title, and relevance.) Anyway, content here included a 40-minute talk from Sergey Brin, a discussion from Yahoo’s Dr. Daniel Rose about user interface challenges for search, and looks at Web spam and search advertising. Google Video apparently has the capacity for comments now. I was expecting to see zillions of comments for the Sergey video and there weren’t any. Surprising.

According to Berkeley’s press release, there will be more content added over time, so watch this collection. Now if we could only get the course contents default-sorted by date…