Google Video has undergone many changes in the past — even Google co-founder Larry Page admitted, “We’re not quite sure what we’re going to get, but we decided we’d try this experiment.” Well, Google Video seems to have found a purpose: it’s now a straight-up video search engine. From the Google Operating System blog:
Google Video indexes videos from tens of video sites, including Metacafe, iFilm, Grouper, Yahoo Video, MySPace, Break.com, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Veoh, AOL Video, Jumpcut, Revver, Guba, BBC, but YouTube dominates the search results. Google Video shows previews for videos hosted by Google’s sites (YouTube and Google Video) and thumbnails for Metacafe, Break.com, and Veoh videos. With around 60 million videos in its index, Google Video says it’s “the most comprehensive [video search engine] on the Web, containing millions of videos indexed and available for viewing. Using Google Video, you can for and watch an ever-growing collection for TV shows, movie clips, music videos, documentaries, personal productions and more from all over the
Web.”
Search results are presented in a similar “frame wrapper” manner much like Google Image Search. Videos are displayed as thumbnails, and clicked results show a page with metadata, the Google nav bar, and suggestions for similar videos.
While the ability to aggregate all of those video search results is handy, will people now flock to Google Video as the primary video search engine, or will people continue performing searches on their preferred sites? Mark Sullivan over at PC World also points out that search results seem skewed to favor Google Video and YouTube-hosted clips:
However, of the videos that come up in the search results, 90 percent or more appear to be videos hosted at either Google or YouTube. That’s understandable for the YouTube videos because there are simply far more of them, but the Google videos are clearly getting preferred treatment.
My only question is this: Is Google Video still a viable destination now that it’s just another search site? There must be a million other viral video link aggregator/search sites out there, like AOL Video, for instance. Why would I use a search engine tool that favors YouTube and Google Video, when there are others available that might bring back a more diverse set of
results?
He brings up a good point, but it’s hard to deny Google Video’s utility. Despite preferential treatment, Google Video has created an arguably superior search engine to any vertical competitor. Users may not be able to tell the difference, though, if (as Sullivan points out) the results still appear the same.
Youtube is the god of all video sharing web sites, no doubt about it, i love youtube and google, as well as Apple, i think they will make the internet better collectively. There is also another video sharing web site called Motiono ( http://en.sevenload.com/videos/Ocb9YNx/Motiono-com-3 ) which is pretty cool too.
I always thought to myself Google already had this feature but i suppose it is new, it is the right move to make because as the number of videos grow you need a way to organize them and make them easy to find for video watchers, of course Google now even has videos showing up in their actual search engine, perhaps they understand the importance of video and want to take advantage of the momentum. There are other great video sharing sites out there such as Veoh and Yahoo Jumpcut and even Motiono which happens to be a newcommer.