Google Video vs. Metacafe: The Battle Reloaded!

Back in May, the Mountain View company made an interesting update for its second online video sharing service Google Video, indexing results from third-party YouTube-like products such as Metacafe. Today, a major modification was rolled out today, Google making an important change in the way the other videos are displayed. Until today, the clips were embedded straight into the search engine result page, allowing the users to view them using the Google page. Although this was quite unfair because it stole some viewers, the Mountain View company included clips from Metacafe, the old YouTube rival.

As blogger Ionut Alex reported, an important modification was rolled out today when Google places a direct link to the main source of the video. Just like the Google News service that indexes only the title of the headline but, if the user wants to read the article he must visit the original provider. Now, the Google Video search technology shows multiple thumbnails of a certain video along with a link to the original source.

Before the Google acquisition of YouTube in October 2006 for $1.6 billion, the online video sharing service was fighting with Metacafe for the most powerful product in their category. Soon after that, YouTube was promoted by Google and became an extremely popular solution that made Metacafe almost anonymous. However, the decision to index third-party video services on Google Video is quite important as the visitors are now able to use the power of Google Search to find other clips than the one provided by Google's products.

The decision to embed Metacafe's clips into Google Video's results was quite curios because it might attract more important trouble for the search giant, such as lawsuits or complaints. Since the videos belonged to Metacafe and Google included them into a Google Video window, the old YouTube rival was quite affected and lost important amount of traffic.