14 DAY TRIAL // To be honest, I thought that with buying YouTube, Google would put an end to its Video section and service, because they were basically two similar services battling over what is arguably the same market share. With this latest update, I'm thinking about something more in the terms of Google Video complementing YouTube in areas it wouldn't go to because of its user-oriented policy.
What I meant by that is that while the 1.65 billion dollars service is basically a hosting platform, Google Video is slowly turning to be a tool that protects and promotes YouTube. While supposedly a search engine, it does feature AOL videos on the homepage, but it is very biased towards YouTube and content on Google Video, when ranking search results, and only features the inline player for the latter two.
The new feature included with the facelift is the hot videos section that presents the most blogged, most shared and most viewed videos. Ionut Alex. Chitu notes that "Movers & shakers continue to include videos with a growing popularity, while the recommended videos continue to be uninteresting or already watched."
The hosting feature has not been removed and the homepage shows videos that have recently been uploaded to Google Video and every search result page includes a link to the upload section and form. An option to restrict your search to videos hosted by Google was also included.
One of the most interesting features, which I've found while browsing the contents of the homepage, is the time-line search for viewership that was enabled. This really made me think of Google Video as a sort of statistics option to be added to YouTube in the near future. I should think this to be a very interesting and welcomed idea, if the people over at the Mountain View based company choose to go with it or if this was the plan from the starting point.