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Jun. 14, 2007 at 8:47am Eastern by Barry Schwartz

Google Video Morphs Further Into New Video Meta Search Role

Last month in Video Hits Google Universal Search & Google Video Now Live With Meta Search?, we covered how Google Video was morphing into its new role as a meta search engine. Now reports of new video sources have emerged.

Google Video Now a Video Search Engine from Google Blogoscoped describes how Google Video now can include video results from YouTube, Vimeo.com, CollegeHumor, eBaumsWorld, MetaCafe, Google Video itself, Yahoo Video or MySpace. InsideGoogle reports seeing Grouper videos also indexed by Google Video.

Google Video Frames a Search Engine from Google Operating System describes how Google Video redesigned to include a frame at the top of the video. The frame includes "related videos," "email this page," and "flag as inappropriate." You can also collapse the frame to view just the video itself. The search box is now at the extreme top on the left of the page, with some video details, a rate this video feature and a still image from the video. In the middle portion is the video player. Here is a screen capture of a metacafe.com video, framed into Google Video.

YouTube Redesigns and Moves to Google Accounts from Google Operating System reports that YouTube is also redesigning. You can see the old version over here and the new version over here. Here are screen captures of both.

Old Version:

New Version:

Postscript: One more tidbit spotted at InsideGoogle. YouTube has some funky debugging comments, some including:

• we got meta fuck yeah!
• showing the goddamn play button
• The connection just got tea bagged - reset and reload
• Fuck bandwidth detection script its taking too long or not working so fuck it hard
• Flash is affecting badly the performance of the ****.com website
• This feature does not work and crashes the player fix laterz
• HACK HACK HACK HACK HACK this scuks

Postscript #2:

I received a statement from Gabriel Stricker, Google spokesperson:

In January, we gave a preview of how Google Video and YouTube will evolve going forward. We mentioned that Google Video will continue to focus on search and innovating technologies to make more information more available and accessible. And we reiterated that YouTube will continue its place as the leader in online video -- and that over time we envision most user-generated and premium video content will be hosted on YouTube.

Now we've made even more progress towards realizing that vision. On Google Video, users will now be able to watch videos from various websites via a web crawl. For those videos which were not uploaded to YouTube or Google, users will be able to see a thumbnail image of that video and then have the ability to be redirected to where the video is hosted in order to watch it in its entirety. In the US version of Google Video (video.google.com), users will have the option to expand a video to view up to 15 thumbnails in a javascript slide-open window. This is part of the broader goal to innovate "video crawl," which lets users search for the world's online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.

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