YouTube Quietly Adds Search to Embedded Video

By  |  Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 9:09 am

While searching for videos on today’s election happenings, I stumbled upon a feature which must have just recently been added to embedded videos. The functionality allows for a search box to appear at the top of the video when users are finished watching the video, or during the video after clicking the embed/url information option.

After the search query is typed, the search results appear in-line, meaning the user would never leave the page where the video was embedded. This has to be seen as a postive by website owners, since they will retain that set of eyes. On the web, that is as good as gold — and when you lose eyes, there’s a good chance they won’t come back.

I’m still not seeing any announcement from YouTube officially announcing the functionality, and I’m not expecting anything either since its relatively minor. However the implications for those who embed videos into their sites are obviously much more significant.

Pictures of the search option are below the fold.

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5 Comments For This Post

  1. Vezquex Says:
    November 14th, 2008 at 8:27 pm

    I just noticed this new feature. No kidding about “quiet”. This is the only article I could find about it! Te search box appears even when you pause the movie.

    It looks fugly. I hope there is an option to remove it.

  2. rtbrokerage Says:
    November 19th, 2008 at 9:28 am

    I have a few YouTube videos (embedded) on my site, and the new search option looks terrible. If they don’t remove it or provide an option to remove it, I will have to un-embedded the videos. This is a bummer, because they they looked so nice before.

  3. tb Says:
    December 3rd, 2008 at 10:10 pm

    from the youtube api

    showsearch
    Values: 0 or 1. Default is 1. Setting to 0 disables the search box from displaying when the video is minimized. Note that if the rel parameter is set to 0 then the search box will also be disabled, regardless of the value of showsearch.
    example:

  4. tb Says:
    December 3rd, 2008 at 10:12 pm

    example: (figure it has th embed code:

    http://www.youtube.com/cp/vjVQa1PpcFPqTQwzhGFBpdqrgIjUe5E9TS-zdpre2GI=&fmt=18&color1=000000&color2=0x003300&fs=1;showsearch=0;egm=0;rel=0“>

  5. Sol Says:
    December 4th, 2008 at 10:26 am

    With a little Googling I figured out how to disable it:

    How To Remove the Search Box From A YouTube Embed

2 Trackbacks For This Post

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