Google Simplifies the Format for Video Results

After removing the useful option to play videos inline*, Google no longer displays the duration and the rating for universal video results. Here's the same YouTube video in 2007, when Google launched universal search, and today. The only difference between video results and regular web pages is that videos have thumbnails and the options to find similar pages and to see the cached version aren't included.


I'm not sure if the rating of a video is very useful, but the duration, the date when it was uploaded and the number of views might be helpful. Google shows similar information for scientific papers, forums and this approach could be extended to other categories of web pages.

* The option to play videos results without opening a new page is available at Yahoo Search.

Google Groups Video Results

Google adjusted the interface for video results that are part of universal search. Until now, Google promoted two videos in the first 10 results if the query was strongly associated with videos, but they looked like standard results. The new interface separates the two results from Google Video and this is more in line with other types of OneBoxes (images, local business, news) that evolved into universal search results.

Another change is that the image results group has 4 images instead of only 3 and it can be displayed inside the list of search results, not just at the top or at the bottom. When the image results group shows up at the top of the page, the thumbnails are significantly larger.


Building an universal search engine that manages to rank web pages, images, videos, books, maps turned out to be a difficult task, so Google tries to do something easier: rank OneBoxes for different specialized search engines and display them in appropriate places. You can find a version of Google that doesn't include universal search results at searchmash.com.