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 […]

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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:


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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