“the high proportion of video on YouTube/Google makes the concept of video search less interesting.” Quite on the contrary. Lots of stuff (video) makes the concept of (video) search crucial/competitive advantage. Especially in growing competition.

If YouTube was cloned, and equipped with an excellent search algorithm, it would take away those millions of eyeballs in the long run from the present YouTube. In a better site’ e.g. I could
a, see the best quality Colbert report,
b, of the exact date I am looking for,
c, in a mobile version,
d, and in the original version (not a home video response),
e, in black and white (if at all) etc.
to mention but a few problems Google needs to deal with.

On Google Video and YouTube: check these keywords:
colbert, -report, -stephen, -steven
I still get results with Stephen Colbert, although I pretended to search for ‘any other colbert but the guy from s.c. report’ because the system is not good enough. The negative search was only able to filter what the accompanying text is, and not the video. It is still not 100% performance, not clever enough. It did not recognize a cultural product of ’s.c. report’ – yet (!).

And yes, Google will start crawling for video. No assumption: explicitly stated intention by Google VP Product Management, Salar Kamangar. Should have done so a lot earlier, in fact.

And it is also true in a way that G and Yt are ‘one company’, but maybe it’s more precise to say that G has decided to launch two kinds of video services: G Video (self developed) and Yt (buy-up), and they will be both in competition for users’ eyeballs, and in complementary relationship regarding users’ intentions and advertiser’s preferences.

(I don’t know if we are still talking at cross purposes. Help me to understand better what you mean.)

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I want to clarify one thing, though. My question about taking a sidetrip to a search engine was not so much a criticism of Google maintaining two sites. After all, Google and YouTube are now one and the same company. My point was more that the high proportion of video on YouTube/Google makes the concept of video search less interesting.

Google Video is now, as another NTV commenter points out, search as applied to a controlled index, rather than search that results from crawling all the content out there. I would assume Google will start crawling for video, but today it’s pretty productive to just look through the two sites it owns.

Liz