A blog posted by Google on Friday afternoon revealed that it has begun showing links to different video sites and search engines in its music related search results, not just YouTube.
In an effort to provide users with better video results, the videos will include clear text indicating the length of the video, the album and the year it was published.
For example, we searched for Green Day, and got the following results;
As you can see, length, album and year are clearly shown and each video listing now includes additional “Also watch on” links that might otherwise have only shown up further down the page or on deeper pages.
In the example above, the outbound links point to a mix of video-specific sites – Dailymotion, Myspace and Metacafe and even to competitor search engine, Yahoo.
Google explains the new feature;
“The feature scans the entire web for video content and algorithmically ranks the best sources for each song. Rather than return repetitive links, we group results for the same song together, making it easier to scan and choose the song you’re looking for.”
Search Engine Land has suggested that this transition is in response to the growing chorus of complaints around the world that Google favours its own sites.
They blogged;
“This move seems like an obvious response to those complaints but, not surprisingly, Google doesn’t say anything along those lines in its blog post.”
Whether or not this is a direct response to these complaints is not known, but with so much animosity towards Google of late, it certainly looks likely.
Whatever its agenda, we predict that Google will start rolling out more features like this in the very near future.
