I’ve noticed an interesting pattern in Google’s video search strategy.
Video search is probably the most important video access method on the net (very much like any other media format). Google used to have video search right on the homepage beside “Images”.
Then, Google acquired YouTube and added it to the video search result. Later, they announced the Video-Site-Map format and started indexing other video services into the video search results (though it always seemed like results from YouTube showed up first, not to mention that you can preview only YouTube Videos from within the search results..). Later on, Google changed the page layout, but video was still #3 after web & image search.
However – something happened there…
For a while now, many people are using YouTube to search for videos, rather than Google.. maybe this trend started to change? It was obvious that searching for videos at Google provides more results from more video websites, including YouTube thanks to the widely adopted Video-Site-Map..
What happened next? Google took “Video” from the third place – to the last, hidden-behind-a-menu, 16th place!! (I’m not joking) and TechCrunch once demonstrated what this means.. – 1:3 of the traffic.
A few weeks later (days ago), Google added YouTube as a “Type” of search, right beside Video – as an alternative to Video search. (currently live on Google.com). Why would anyone need that if YouTube is already indexed in Video Search? to get less results? Pure YouTube? Shouldn’t that be done from YouTube.com?
YouTube is the only brand name in Google’s list of search types.
Will Google stay fateful to it’s promise to let users search the entire world’s information or would they prefer that users search in Google’s own services? ( thus, making sure that everyone submit content to Google’s services and not to the competition’s.)
Can’t YouTube compete fairly? It is a very Microsoft-ish move – very similar to bundling stuff to your market dominant OS. Is google going to start leveraging their search service to kill the competition in all the other services which rely on search for substantial amount of their traffic? Is it because Google Tips didn’t work for them, so they try something else?
Do no Evil? What’s next? It seems like Google is trying to become a Wikipedia as well. Maybe they’ll come up with an alternative to Blog Search: Blogger.com only search! (if you think about it – it makes the same sense..)
UPDATE: TechCrunch picked it up as well.
