When Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in late 2006, there was a lot of speculation as to what the search giant was going to do with the fast-growing host for homegrown video. At least one observer thought that Google was moronic for making the purchase, especially for such a high price, given the potential for copyright-related lawsuits. Google recently tipped its hand, though, with major implications for the future of online video.
The first announcement was simple enough: Google Video’s search index would start showing results from YouTube as well as Google Video. That makes perfect sense, since it lets the companies play off each other’s traffic. Consider this: Google’s monthly audience in December 2006 was 108 million, while YouTube received “only” 38 million visitors in comparison. But if you want to compare apples to apples, Google Video drew only 15 million visitors in the same month. Also, users of YouTube spent twice as much time per session on the site as users of Google Video.
To judge from statements by Salar Karmanger, vice president of product management at Google, this is the first step in a longer process: “Google’s strength – and its history – is grounded in search and in innovating technologies to make more information more available and accessible…Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world’s online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.”
So Google is building a comprehensive video search engine. This is no surprise. Yahoo and AOL already have separate video search engines. But neither of them owns such a huge source of online videos, and neither of them link to YouTube. That gives Google a massive advantage to begin with.
And once Google starts applying its own search algorithms to video, looking for and viewing videos online could become a lot more popular. Google vice president David Eun notes that “People will start finding lots of videos they never even knew existed.” There’s a lot more going on here than just the construction of a video search engine, though, as technically challenging as that might be.
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