YouTube Comes To Google Earth; Pity YouTube Itself Doesn’t Offer Geosearch

I just posted a bunch of videos to YouTube yesterday of skating down the boardwalk in Newport Beach. Maybe one day they’ll show up in Google Earth. That’s because Google Earth is now showing video clips that have been geotagged to particular areas, according to Google’s LatLong Blog.

To find them, click Featured Content in the Layers panel. Little YouTube logos will light up on the map (if you don’t see them, make sure the YouTube box is checked within Featured Content).

What’s unclear is how exactly the videos are selected. When I zoom in on Newport Beach, the videos I uploaded (and geotagged for the area) don’t show. Instead, there are only about a dozen or so clips.

How does that compare to a geosearch for videos in Newport Beach on YouTube. Who knows!

Absurdly, you can’t seem to search YouTube videos by geography despite YouTube asking people to map their videos as part of the upload process. I thought I must be missing something, but Barry Schwartz found the same thing when writing his YouTube Videos & Google Maps Integration post at Search Engine Roundtable in August. That post is also a nice tutorial on how to map video at YouTube and adjust a map location. YouTube itself seems to have NO help information on this topic.

So, Google Earth seems to finally give YouTubers the ability to find video by geography, but apparently that will only be the video that the Google Earth team decides to feature. Rank-and-file video clips don’t appear to automatically get in. Here’s hoping that even more video will be displayed in the future (and that YouTube remembers it’s part of a search company and improves its own search capabilities).

Can’t wait for YouTube search to improve? Webware points to Mappeo, which searches against YouTube by geography. But no dice, I still couldn’t find my geotagged YouTube videos.

Lots of related discussion on Techmeme, including John Battelle’s highlighting this as another move to Google Earth becoming Google’s Second Life virtual world contender. Yep, and we’ve had other signs of this. See:

• Google To Build Second Life Metaverse On Google Earth In China?
• Google To Pressure Facebook To "Free" Social Data & Planning Google Earth World?
• Google Earth and 3D Warehouse Opened Up to ‘Game Developers’