Google Testing Comment Search On YouTube

Oct 16, 2009 at 3:09pm ET by Matt McGee

Though the level of discourse in YouTube comments will never win awards, Google appears to be quietly testing a comment search feature. You won’t find it anywhere obvious in the YouTube interface — not on a video page, not even in Advanced Search. It’s available at this URL (you can change the query at the end):

http://www.youtube.com/comment_search?q=U2+360+Tour

As ReadWriteWeb points out, this actually could be a valuable monitoring tool for companies, individuals, artists, and other celebrities that are the subject of a lot of YouTube videos and comments. There’s even a real-time element at work: Updates are pushed out as new comments are indexed, and YouTube lists a handful of “trending topics” from user comments.

But this appears to be very much a beta project. To test the comment search, I grabbed an exact snippet of text from a comment that was posted a week ago on one of my own videos. Comment search found no matching results:

Perhaps this is one reason why comment search isn’t yet part of the main YouTube interface.

Update: A YouTube product manager emailed this update regarding the comment above not appearing in comment search: “We return comment results from the past seven days and it looks like your U2 comment was just on the lip of that period.”

Update, October 19: According to this YouTube blog post, comment search has been moved into Test Tube, the experimental lab area of YouTube.

Matt McGee is the Search Engine Land Assignment Editor, and offers search marketing consulting and training to businesses of all sizes. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and HyperlocalBlogger.com.

See more articles by Matt McGee >

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