> In its first version, you weren’t even able to watch videos at
> the site (you’d only see stills & captions from TV shows).

The first version was actually quite useful, because the captions were well-indexed and you could find answers to questions like "On what day did <some_news_program> first mention <some_item_of_news>?"

Any Screenshots of the first version?

Here are some from the day it went live, you can see it reads "Search recent TV programs online." ("It’s similar to Google print that’s trying to take something that’s not online and put it online," a Google Video product manager said back then.)

http://blogoscoped.com/files/google-video-screens.jpg

Philipp,

Nice to see you back in Google News... Just a side note...

http://news.google.com/news?um=1&tab=wn&q=Google%20Video%20Now%20a%20Video%20Search%20Engine

Thanks Philipp

I think this change makes Google Video more confusing to the end-user. Of the links to videos on the front-page, some are hosted on GV, others on YouTube and more on completely different sites; and this is not made clear. Is GV now primarily a hosting service or a search engine?

Why do youtube keep messing with the site, they're making it worse. If I wanted a site that looked like google video, I'd use google video.

very good, perfect, a great progress.

a video search engine, of course.

http://googlified.com/files/google-video-result-haochi.png
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8702822021584184476&q=haochi&total=999999999&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search
You can manipulate the *number* of search results. (number only, I suppose)

Didier* points to this search result which may or may not give an approximation of how many videos Google indexed:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=&num=10&so=1&start=0

... roughly 81 million.

* http://media-tech.blogspot.com/2007/06/un-milliard-de-vidos-sur-internet-50.html

Check the title (of the page). Google Video pages lost their titles.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5252204135978695486

Isn't this move a contradiction with Blogger's new feature to post video hosted by Google Video?

No, you'll still be able to upload videos to Google Video. Which is good, at least if you compare the current features of YouTube and Google Video.

The title element contains "Google Video result for http: //video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5252204135978695486", which should be something more meaningful...

I think Google Video can only become more popular now. I think the community is in need of a decent video search engine.

<<Check the title (of the page). Google Video pages lost their titles.
video.google.com/videoplay?doc ...>>

<<The title element contains "Google Video result for http: //video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5252204135978695486", which should be something more meaningful...>>

Thats the same post I think

The death of Google Video as it was. It was such a slick video hosting. :-(God bless Greasemonkey http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/6198

God bless Greasemonkey, Evil damns lazy (?) Youtube engineers...

Well done Google! It's exactly what should have been done. Youtube where people upload videos and Google video as a meta video search engine.

This fits perfectly with google's general strategy. Not only does it get rid of some of the complications of duplicate services with gv and youtube, it also places them on a different level, above the competition. Kind of like they used to do with finance and maps.

Yes GVid never fitted in properly. Google: ______ is fir searcg others have their own names loke orkut, dodgeball, youtube

<<Youtube where people upload videos and Google video as a meta video search engine. >>

That's the confusing thing: you can still upload videos to Google Video.

Its all well and good that google video is now a search engine, but over 90 percent of the videos still show only from youtube or google video. now if i really wanted to search for videos from other websites i would most likely go to www.uvouch.com that does not give any preferential treatment to one site only. Plus there are some really cool features available if somebody registers for free.

I think Google video still needs a lot of work left and they need to stop showing videos from youtube only. They are beginning to behave completely opposite to what they try to portray themselves and they are going to start losing out their fanbase.

Some numbers:

Site Number of videos in Google's index (estimation)
YouTube 57.5 million
Yahoo Video 4 million
Google Video 4 million
My Space 2.5 million

They could at least let you restrict your query to one of the top sites included in the results. Something like a list that says:

YouTube (1234)
MySpace (23)
Yahoo Video (8)
Veoh (7)

only?
http://img501.imageshack.us/img501/896/videogoogleoa9.jpg
from :
http://media-tech.blogspot.com/2007/06/un-milliard-de-vidos-sur-internet-50.html

These numbers are very strange. You never get the same estimation, but 855 million?!?

Try refreshing this page: http://video.google.com/videosearch

It's worth mention again, however, that Google Video gave visitors the option to directly download the actual video to their computer, in order to view / mashup / etc offline.

This is a major feature of GV that YouTube has never had, and probably never will.

Were the site icons in the video thumbnails pushed with this release?

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1347/703801966_02e8f13439_o.jpg

I've seen an icon on most of the videos that gives you a heads up to where the video is hosted. Some videos like those from myspace don't seem to have any icon though.