Google’s got a new service that uses speech-recognition technology to make YouTube videos searchable by keywords or phrases in the clip.

So, for example, you could search for every time that Barack Obama mentions “George Bush” or “healthcare” or any other discernible word or term in a YouTube clip.

Check out the service here

For now, Google is only indexing the transcripts of political videos. And politicians — by virtue of being public figures in the post-Macaca age — know that they can’t expect to control every video of themselves on the ‘Net.

But sooner or later Google is going to start indexing regular (non-political) videos — which means that if I, say, attend an event somewhere and someone mentions my name on camera, I’m now forever linked to that footage.

What if that footage proves embarrassing to me? What if I don’t want to be indexed? Facebook allows me to “un-tag” a photo that I appear in. Will Google do the same? Should it?

I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. Just like Google’s plan to index medical records, I’ve got mixed feelings about this venture.

I obviously can’t “un-tag” my name from the documents that Google’s regular search engines indexes, so should I have the right to un-index myself from a video?

You tell me…