14 DAY TRIAL // Googlers are hurrying to finish and launch whatever they're working on before holidays when, rumor has it, Google is issuing a code freeze until the next year. We've certainly seen a fair share of announcements and new features lately, big and small , and it's not over yet. A couple of new features, spotted by the Google Operating System blog, are the “Cartoons” and “Slideshows” filters making their appearance on Google Video search.
Their use is self-evident, it limits the search results to just cartoons or slideshows as determined by Google's video analysis algorithm. In theory, it sounds OK and the filters make a nice addition to the rather short list, which currently allows users to select between “All Videos,” “Full Length” and “Closed Captioned,” but in practice, they fail to deliver the desired results a surprisingly high number of times. They're not completely useless though, for most searches they should do a decent enough job.
Still, they're a rather small update for a service which doesn't seem to be on the priority list at Google. At most, it looks like something it does because it has to, you can't have a search engine without a dedicated video search, but that's pretty much it, when it comes to video, Google only has one thing in mind, YouTube.
Of course, if you were to count YouTube as a separate search engine it would not only be the biggest video search engine, it would be one of the top search engines in the world as well, so it's hard to motivate Google into devoting too much attention to Video search. This is further accentuated by the fact that YouTube dominates so clearly the online video space that a dedicated video search engine almost seems redundant if you're going to end up on YouTube anyway.
