Google Adds YouTube to Video Search Result
Google has started including content from YouTube in its video search results, integrating clips from the video-sharing site into Google Video search results for the first time since it acquired the company last November for $1.65 billion.
“Starting today, YouTube video results will appear in the Google Video search index,” Salar Kamangar, Google vice president for product management, wrote in a post on the official Google blog last Friday. “When you click on YouTube thumbnails, you will be taken to YouTube.com to experience the videos. Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves in to a service where you can search for the world’s online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.”
Kamangar said Google planned in the future to come out with “a comprehensive video search and content platform.” That would suggest that Google is working on a way to search and index video hosted on outside servers — a complex proposition, since a database of video files can’t be scanned, tagged and ranked as easily as text-based Web pages.
Most video search today is built from a combination of in-house hosting and access to content from third-party sites such as YouTube, Bolt and MetaCafe.
Kamangar also specified that YouTube would endure as an independent subsidiary of Google. Google Video launched in January 2006 but has not seen the traffic that YouTube or even Yahoo! Video have been able to attract, and some observers speculated that the company would eventually phase out Google Video in favor of the newly-purchased YouTube.
“Google Video and YouTube will continue to play to their respective strengths,” he said in the post. “Google’s strength — and its history — is grounded in search and in innovating technologies to make more information more available and accessible. YouTube, meanwhile, excels at being a leading content destination with a dynamic community of users.”
