After introducing the Maps Plus Box and testing the Finance Plus Box, Google experiments with a Video Plus Box that shows a preview of a video inside the search results. Razvan Antonescu, who spotted this experiment, saw it only for a Google Video page, so it's likely that - at least for the moment - Google will add it only for Google Video and YouTube.
Of course, Google should continue to be objective and include it for all the online video sites, but there are some questions:
* What are the videos sites? How to detect all of them and find the embeddable code?
* Will those sites want the Plus Box? Maybe they'll say Google steals traffic from them, because they want to show ads and to have big page views.
* Who will click on the search result to see the video (and maybe some comments and context), like they used to do?
* It will be the first time when content outside of Google control will be included in the search results (for example, the thumbnails from image search results are hosted by Google). Will there be performance issues?
Google also promised to add more video sites to Google Video and to transform it into a real video search engine. They'll have to answer to the same questions for Google Video, so they should connect these two efforts to make videos more accessible.
On that page were 2 video results. First from Google Video and second from YouTube. Both were fully functional. So its safe to assume that in the near future ALL the video results (at least from those 2 sites) will have the one box attached
ReplyDeleteI found a phone icon near an ad on the right when I searched for laptops on google, but I think now it has gone
ReplyDelete> It will be the first time
ReplyDelete> when content outside of Google
> control will be included in the
> search results (for example, the
> thumbnails from image search
> results are hosted by Google).
I don't quite agree with this bit. Google already takes content from other sites and converts it to their own content, like Google Image search result thumbnails, and IMO in *no way* will they handle this any different in Google web search results, because as you say that would suddenly expose them to outside factors like sluggishness of services. So either they make a copy of the video content they show, or they make sure the content is on one of their owned servers (like YouTube content), or they make sure to not show a video snippet at all. But they won't simply include an externally hosted video (and also not an outside video player, they will always use their own player, I believe). Of course, you never know, but this is my analysis...
> Both were fully functional. So
ReplyDelete> its safe to assume that in the near > future ALL the video results
But those two, Google Video and YouTube, are specifically Google-owned properties.