Posted by Sapna Mehta, Online Operations Associate

Ever wish the sites you visit could present customized options catering to your tastes?

Our Recommended Videos feature does just that. By logging in to your Google account and visiting Google Video, you will see multiple videos that pertain to your search interests. You can find these videos underneath the hot videos section of the homepage. Just like the hot videos, you can click on the arrow buttons in the top right corner to see more recommended videos.

While our search suggestions give you search term suggestions for individual queries you enter, these video picks are based on trends of search queries you've used, as well as other videos that you've watched. It's yet another way to discover interesting video content from across the web - this time, personalized for you.


To take advantage of this feature, you'll be asked to sign in to Web History. It's up to you how much customization you'd like - for example, you can choose which searches are included, and which aren't. For more information about protecting your privacy while enjoying the benefits of personalized search, check out the following video - About Web History: Privacy.

Posted by Justin Donnelly, Software Engineer

The "Hot videos" section of the Google Video homepage offers up the web's most popular videos, determined by how often they're being watched, shared and blogged about across the Web. If, like me, you think this feature is awesome, you'll love our latest update. Now, instead of only 12 hot videos, there are over a hundred available by clicking on the new pagination buttons on the upper right corner of the "Hot videos" section. Just like our TV view, the video you're currently watching isn't interrupted as you browse through the pages.

Note that these videos are updated throughout the day and are specific to your country. (Wondering what's hot in the Low Countries? Try our Dutch site: http://video.google.nl/.) This expanded view of what's hot can reveal a lot about what's going on in online video. For example, when Weezer released their "Pork and Beans" video recently, nearly every "celebrity" featured in the video appeared in the expanded list within the next couple of days.


Give it a try- You're sure to find something here to entertain you.

Posted by Kun Zhang, Software Engineer

The Google Video team continually strives to make your video search experience more enjoyable. In an effort to do so, we have added a suggestions feature to help you discover more interesting videos. Sometimes the suggestions expand the scope of your search, and sometimes they make your search more specific--it all depends on what you searched for and which suggestion you click on.

To view your search suggestions, click on the "Also try" links on top of the search results to refine or expand your search.


For example, if you are searching for "kittens", you may see suggestions like "cute kittens", "funny kittens", "newborn kittens", "techno kittens", "treadmill kittens" and so on. Clicking on these suggested search terms will lead you to the respective search results page, and another set of suggestions. If you continue following through these suggestion links, your first search may very well turn into hours of exploration.

The suggestions feature is available across all views - TV view, Grid view and List view. We hope that these suggested search terms will add a few different flavors to your search experience.

Posted by Ken Harrenstien, Software Engineer

Those of you interested in closed captioning may have noticed a new feature on this front- the ability to search only for closed-captioned videos. Naturally this is very useful for people like myself who can't hear the audio, but of course there are many others who either want the sound off or who can understand the writing better than the speech.

If you go to the "Advanced Video Search" page you'll see a new constraint called "Subtitles: Search only closed captioned videos". Try clicking on that check-box and doing an otherwise normal search; the results will include those videos that are known to have captions. Fun example: to see a list of all captioned videos on Google Video, check that box and restrict the domain to "google.com".

It's still not quite as sophisticated as we want it to be - it currently only knows about videos in Google Video, and doesn't yet allow you to specify a language of interest. Nevertheless it's another small step that we hope will encourage greater awareness and use of captions.

A related feature of interest that you may not have noticed is the ability to jump directly into a video at the point where captions of interest appear. If your search results include caption snippets, there will be a link called "Start playing at search term", which is extremely handy for long videos. In order to see it, you also have to select "List View" (the middle icon in the Results menu bar).

Here's a nice example - search for ["that's a tremendous gift"] . Make sure you've selected List View, and you should see a video featuring Randy Pausch. Clicking on the "Start playing at search term (50:16)" link will take you to a point slightly before the appearance of that caption.

Posted by Sapna Mehta, Online Operations Associate

We know a lot of you are committed multi-taskers, and hey, who doesn't love the TV view for efficient video searching? To make you even better multi-taskers, we've added a feature that allows you to browse through multiple results pages, sort, filter or refine your search query- all without interrupting the video you're watching. The list and grid views also inherit this feature.

We hope that this feature will make your video searching and viewing more enjoyable.

Follow these steps to check it out:

1. Conduct a search using any query and click on a result to play a video.
2. While the video is playing, scroll to the bottom of the results and click back and forth between the pages of results. For example, click "Next" or "Previous", or click on the page number.
3. You can also go to the search box at the top and perform a new search. New results will be displayed, but the current video keeps playing.

Posted by Sapna Mehta, Online Operations Associate

Hopefully by now you've had some time to play around with our different views for search results and find the one that best suits you.

For fans of grid view, we've added a new feature to make it easier to find what you're looking for. Now, when you're viewing search results in grid view you can roll over the video image for more information about the video. By moving your mouse over a video listed in the results, you'll be able to see multiple thumbnails of the video as well as the video description. This will give you a more representative idea of what each video is about as you browse your search results.


We've also restored some popular features. For those of you who upload videos to the site, you'll be happy to hear that our Community features (comments and ratings) and Advanced options settings (ability to restrict downloading as well as embedding and regional restrictions) are back.

To get these updates delivered right to you, click on the icon (on the blog sidebar) to add Google Video blog updates to your Google homepage or Google Reader.

Posted by Michael Cohen, Product Manager

As we've mentioned before, the Google Video team wants to make it possible for you to search every video on the web. This is a tall order, and we're constantly working to make sure we have the latest and greatest videos. Ever wondered how we actually discover all the videos that make it into video search?

While we receive a small percentage of our videos from user uploads, we get the vast majority of them by crawling the web. We've gotten pretty good at this over the past several years, but of course it's helpful when webmasters tell us exactly where to look to find their videos. This is where a protocol called Video Sitemaps (an extension of the Sitemap Protocol) comes in. Video Sitemaps allow webmasters to give us links directly to their videos and provide valuable descriptive information such as a video's title, description, and length. We can then target our crawlers at these videos and pull them into the Google Video index, allowing them to show up in Google Video searches as well as searches on Google.com.

Some key information provided by a sitemap includes:

• A link to the video's "landing page" (i.e., the link you'd visit in your browser)
• A title of the video for us to display in our search results
• A description of the video to accompany each result
• The duration of the video
• An image thumbnail that we can show in our search results
• A link to an embeddable video player -- so you can watch the video in TV view

If you administer a website with video and would like to see your site appear in our search results, a Video Sitemap is definitely your best bet. To get started, create a Video Sitemap, sign into Google Webmaster Tools, and add the Video Sitemap to your account.

Posted by Steve Gerding, Software Engineer

Today, by popular demand, we are making TV view the default search result view for Google Video. If you haven't seen it yet, TV view is a new interface that lets you browse search results, watch videos, and check out related videos -- all on the same page. Here's what it looks like:


Videos that we are able to embed will play directly in the TV view player when you click on them. These include almost all Google- and YouTube-hosted videos, as well as videos from many other sites such as metacafe.com, crackle.com, and hundreds of others. Videos that cannot be embedded will display a thumbnail or filmstrip that links to the page where the video can be played. If you're a webmaster and would like your videos to be embeddable in TV view, check out our Video Sitemaps Help Center.

In addition to playing the video, clicking on a search result will reload the list of related videos on the right hand side of the page. Next time you're watching a video, try flipping through the related videos; you might find something even better that what you originally searched for! Just like search results, most related videos can be played directly in the TV view player.

We hope you enjoy this new search experience. Of course, if you prefer either list or grid view to TV view, you can switch your view preference at any time by clicking on one of the view icons at the top of the page:

Posted by Greg Billock, Software Engineer

As part of our mission, we on the Google Video team want you to be able to search, browse and discover videos from across the web. More than a year ago, we described our renewed focus on organizing all the web's video. Today, in addition to expanding Google Video's search capabilities, we have a number of new browse- and search-related features we're excited to share.

Now you can choose any of three ways to view your video search-results: a traditional list view, a grid view and, for those of you who like to maximize your video-watching efficiency, a TV view, where you can watch an embedded video while continuing to view your search results next to the video for a more seamless browse and search experience.

Try them out by clicking on the gray icon boxes:



You may have also noticed that we've given the Google Video homepage a bit of a facelift. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for you to find and access the web's most compelling videos, and just as before, you can see what videos people are viewing, sharing, and blogging about -- but now, with the new TV view, you can also watch many of the top videos directly on the homepage.

I want to start off by giving my heartfelt thanks to all of who have been loyal readers of the Google Video Blog. It's been a real pleasure delivering the best of Google Video to your screens. But even though you may not be receiving your daily dose of entertainment from me, fret not! There's a plethora of footage at your fingertips on Google Video and of course on YouTube! And if blog reading is a regular habit, do check out the YouTube Blog to find out what the YT editors consider must-see.

And again, thank you for staying tuned. Here's to hours of happy viewing to you.

Warm messages from the soldiers' hearts to their loved ones. Happy Holidays everyone!












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