He's not making a comparison of Youtube vs. Google as competing companies. His point is there's a growing number of people searching for information through video first rather than text.

It's an interesting concept and one that I never would've imagined.

The nature of search results will change accordingly. Your example of the boy who uses YouTube to search for -everything- is perfect. And search engine optimization and online marketing will have to adapt.

The lack of results you found on YouTube for "Chicken Noodle Soup", "George Washington", "Astrophysics", etc., may be a sign that not everyone has realized the importance of video for getting the word out about something. But it may also be due, at least in part, to the fact that most people posting videos on YouTube are not very concerned about writing detailed, search-optimized titles and descriptions for their submissions. This turns out to be a good thing - for now anyway - for those of us who do take the time to optimize these things.

Video won't replace text, nor does an anecdote about a single 9 year old mean much. Video is important and will become more so, but not as a standalone site ala Youtube but as a component of complex pages.

The 9 year old kid can just search Youtube because it has what he wants and his wants are probably pretty simple - he's 9 after all. Imagine that kid 10 years from now in college. He wants to make... roast chicken. What he needs is a recipe... but the web can provide much more than that. What should come up in a search are pages with great recipes AND that contain videos showing how to make it. The video doesn't replace the text, but supplements it. It's one thing to say 'truss the chicken' but having a video there that shows you how to do that is much more valuable. Now add in the ability to integrate that recipe with other apps (online grocery, etc). Similarly a search for George Washington might go to a site that has text but also photos of important sites in his life and perhaps videos of scholarly proceedings or fictional reenactments.

That's much more likely the future and, while I'm sure we'll see people use Youtube as a search engine, video just isn't the only way most people want to get information. That's the point - there IS no one way, but a myriad of ways most of which will combine the basic components of text, video, animation, sound and still pictures. Give me a search engine that ranks that kind of information correctly.

In fact, youngsters between the ages of 9-14 increased there usage of YouTube by 500% while increasing their usage of Google Search by only 49%.

Thanks for a great post that also made me chuckle a few times - maybe I should stop using Google and go over to YouTube for a week - maybe the information I get in videos will be better than the the text based information I get out of Google.

- HOW TO ?
- ENTERTAINMENT
- LOOK AT ME (MY FRIENDS, MY FAMILY)OR LOOK AT THIS

Back in approximately '97, surely no later than mid-'98, the entire Web had only 300 webpages *total* that would come back to, crum, I want to say "Google" searches..

Cyber hugs from North Georgia.. :)

PS Was Google even around then..? :))

PPS Found out from *that* YouTube search just now that there's a nationwide Drive Your Studebaker Day on the Fourth of July, 2009.. *NEVER* would have known.. Too funny..

As long we cannot copy/paste parts of a video we cannot make a mash up ourselves for creating a short message.

Thus current uses and purposes are different.

R

comparisons made (like by Mark Cuban) with Hulu are stupid. His myopic view is blinkered through lens of rev models. YT and Hulu are apples and pears (this will become glaringly obvious in a few years).

YT was always about creating another contextual semantic layer that anyone (society) could benefit from and create super-charged value. the video version of wiki -- is one way to think about it.

All google had to do was wait (for the backfill).

i have to admit. looks like the experiment is about to work.

hat tip to google.

well done

Although I don't think that video will ever replace text, there's no doubt that video is going to gain huge ground in the next 5-10 years and, supplement a lot of our common text-only activities. We've already started seeing the rise of video blogging as well as "video comment" options on popular blog commenting platforms like Disqus. Video services like Vimeo combine the two so that people can comment on videos...there's a lot of blending going on...and there's no doubt that as internet goers become more comfortable with Video over text, the democratization of video capture technologies will likely lead to a substantial increase in video based user generated content. Specializing in search for video content will definitely be big business.

Of course, it won't replace text overall. It will only be a pervasive supplement for people who prefer video as a medium over text. One thing's for sure - Ian's kid won't be alone. There will be millions of people that start to go to video first before a text sea

Beaut reminder! Thanks, Ruth

So at 8 years old, it turns out he is one of the few kids in his class at school who knows how to use the bibliographic index at our local library.

Notwithstanding those concerns I was recently involved in organising an event in New Zealand in which we recorded presentations by local technology entrepreneurs and posted them on Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/UPW2W

Being geographically distant from the major consumer and capital markets creates a huge challenge for our entrepreneurs. But by utilising Youtube as a channel we can share some of our good ideas with the world.

A picture says 1,000 words but text, charts, voice and touch are all needed in our natural search, discovery and understanding processes.

The current limitation with YouTube and all other Flash/Sorensen video types is that there are very few companies which can provide comprehensive transcripts of the video and, therefore, granular search terms in a library --- with possibly the exception of blinkx.

Even the recent Adobe strategic alliance with Google and Yahoo! to make flash files more searchable doesn't extend to transcripting every video posted on YT so that we can, for example, search for the key phrases and gold nuggets in a 10 minute video.

Until that happens, text search and Google will remain dominant.

Also if we look at what Google is doing in Google Docs and Google Knol we gain more insight into Google's search and content integration, and they're deploying some smart AI and semantics there.

Lots of interesting things to consider, I think. As late as the 80's, music was often front and center, something to focus attention on and derive mucho entertainment from. Throughout the 90's and into this decade, music has become ambient background for visual mediums like movies, TV, commercials, and obviously games.

Now, with 12-year-olds "listening" to music on YouTube, the visuals are becoming ambient as well. I tune in, I tune out. Sometimes I look, sometimes I listen, sometimes both simultaneously.

Advertisers really won't be able to count on eyeballs all the time, and more and more product and service messages will be sneaking into mainstream music. Imagine Beyonce singing a tune where she drops a line about shopping at Express. Not impossible to imagine, is it?