YouTube's New Search Options Format

YouTube has a new border for related searches and higher search options. Now you can select multiple filters from a category and unite related searches. For example, you can find long-form HD videos that are obtainable in the WebM format.

If you click on one of the queries from the "Explore" section, you'll replace the unique query. A more interesting alternative is to mouse over a query and click the "plus" icon: this way, you'll refine your original search.

YouTube adds both filters and refinements to the query and separates them by comma. A search for [slow motion, hd, webm, high speed camera] includes two filters that are treated discretely: "hd" and "webm".

You can also add the name of a channel (example: [slow motion, @tpsfilmstudio]) or the name of a group (example: [slow motion, sports]).

The new features were part of an trial called YouTube Topics that tried to help users find videos. "We know that sometimes people come to YouTube looking for a specific video, but at other times, they have only a uneven idea of the kind of videos they want."

1000 @Google Talks videos now on YouTube

Last week, the @Google Talks team uploaded its 1000th video to YouTube. If you’re not recognizable with this series, we host talks by authors and commentators at Google, and post videos of their readings and talks on a devoted YouTube channel.

Authors@Google began in the fall of 2005 when we noticed that some astonishing people were passing through the Google hallways. A few scrappy Googlers galvanized to create a more reliable pipeline of requests and a dignified program that kicked off with Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki. As Google and our technology grew, so did the program. “Authors@Google” has blossomed into @Google Talks, a full-fledged speaker series, prolonged across distributed offices and found a home on YouTube, so that we can share these conversations outside of the Googleplex.

The @Google Talks series aims to detain the popular and intellectual zeitgeist, as well as ideas that deserve a deeper focus an expert can give in more than a five-minute soundbite. From the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates to Alice Walker to Michael Pollan to Raphael Saadiq, the program has grown to encompass not just authors, but musicians, innovators, notable women, chefs and more. The team that hosts these events is made up of devoted and passionate volunteers from all across the company.

Our most viral video was of Conan O'Brien, who stopped by during his "Legally forbidden from Being Funny on Television" tour for a hilarious hour involving bagpipes, Andy Richter and one lucky Googler who got to touch his hair. We've featured master and apprentice—from Thomas Keller of The French Laundry to Keller protege Corey Lee on the process of gap his new restaurant Benu—and varying viewpoints, exemplified by Christopher Hitchens on "God Is Not Great" and Tim Keller on "The Reason for God." And that’s just the beginning. Other popular visitors comprise Congressman Ron Paul, President Barack Obama, linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, presentation designer Garr Reynolds, author Elizabeth Gilbert, Randall Munroe of XKCD and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

We’re excited for what lies ahead, and we hope you'll tune in and join us.

Picasa Web's New Homepage

Picasa Web's homepage has been redesigned to highlight the photos recently uploaded by the people you're following. The homepage no longer displays all your albums, so you'll only be able to see the most fresh 8 albums.

"This new design centers around photos that are attractive to you. We wanted to give you faster access to the newest photos from your family and friends along with some great photos from the gifted Picasa community. When you log in to Picasa Web Albums, you will not only see your own albums, but albums that have been common with you, the latest public albums from people you follow, and featured photos from the Picasa community right on your home page," explains Google's Ping Chen.

While "recent activity" has always been a section on the homepage, now you can no ignore it. YouTube's homepage has lately switched to a feed view, a stream of actions popularized by Facebook.

If you don't like the new homepage, bookmark this URL: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos or click "My Photos" when visiting the homepage.

Trip report: Google and YouTube in Pakistan 2010

Earlier this month, a squad from Google and YouTube went to Pakistan to explore business and content opportunities, following up on Google’s Clinton Global proposal commitment to Pakistan and to sponsor and contribute in Pakistan’s first International Youth Conference and Festival. It’s hard to envisage a country more at the nexus of geo-politics today than Pakistan, and our team educated a lot about the state of the Pakistani technology, media and non-profit sectors.

Internet connectivity in Pakistan is quite low—estimates put diffusion at around 10%—but opportunities for growth are evident. For one thing, broadband costs are quite cheap compared to other parts of the world—around $13/month. Smartphone usage is also on the rise, and there are a rising number of Pakistani developers who are creating mobile applications for sale both in Pakistan and overseas. Around 60% of Pakistanis have a mobile phone, and their standard bill is around $3/month. Not surprisingly, SMS is one of the main means of communication in Pakistan.

One of the keys to bringing more Pakistanis online is the quantity of local Pakistani content obtainable on the Internet. There are some enormous examples so far: for instance, Coke Studio, a “fusion” music project sponsored by Coke that features well-liked Pakistani musicians, grew so popular on YouTube last summer that it was the 11th-most viewed channel on the site. Dozens of news organizations have begun to use YouTube as a global allocation platform as well, reaching not only Pakistanis online but the diaspora abroad. The Pakistani media is young and greedy—it was just eight years ago that the government opened up the airwaves to permit non-state media channels to exist, and in that short time the media has full-grown to become an important player in the public conversation in Pakistan, despite infrequent crackdowns from authorities. Citizen media has also played an ever more big role in Pakistan: for example many Pakistanis used cellphone cameras to document the destruction wrought by the floods in Pakistan last summer.

Google.org granted $1 million to Pakistani flood release in September, contained crisis response tools, and launched a flood relief landing page. On our trip we met with quite a few non-profits who are doing incredible work to help the exaggerated citizens get back on their feet. Our products, in particular Google MapMaker, proved to be of use to flood relief agencies for tracking expansion in the wake of the tragedy. Over innumerable cups of hot chai and mixed grilled barbecues, we heard stories of normal Pakistanis using Google technology to article the flood and attach with one another during the crisis.

Pakistan’s future no doubt lies with its youth—an unbelievable 62% of Pakistanis are under the age of 25. Perhaps the highlight of our trip was the International Youth Conference we participated in, which was run by an association called Khudi. Khudi was founded by the dynamic Maajid Nawaz, a former extremist who distorted his views towards moderate Islam and has since devoted his life to educating young people on freedom of appearance and anti-extremism (Nawaz also beam at Google Zeitgeist this year). It was inspirational to meet leaders like Nawaz who are committed to emboldening Pakistan’s younger generations to use the web to transport Pakistan to the rest of the world, and to give the rest of the world a more absolute picture of Pakistan. In this way we saw an chance for technology to not only foster economic development, but also to break down borders in the region. We asked a few of the Pakistani leaders we met with to converse about Pakistan’s future, and here’s what they had to say.

This was the largest allocation of Googlers ever to visit Pakistan, and we’re looking forward to continued engagement in the region.

Link to a YouTube Comment

If you happen to find a YouTube comment that's really interesting and you want to share it with other people, mouse over the comment, click on the "Share" button and copy the link.

Each YouTube comment has a permalink, but it's not easy to notice that the comment is displayed below the video in a special section titled "Linked Comment".

You could also use this feature to annotate a video before sharing it with your friends. Post a comment, copy the link and use it to highlight your comment.

YouTube's Playlist Bar Strikes Back

YouTube's playlist bar that shows up at the bottom of the page when you open a playlist or you click on a video from your subscriptions has a new use: displaying the list of liked videos after clicking on the "like" button. It's also used to display the videos from a playlist after adding a new video to the playlist. Unfortunately, this isn't very useful, the bar is annoying and it can slow down your browser. If you have hundreds of liked videos, adding all of them to the bar takes a while and the browser is no longer responsive.

Many YouTube users complain about this new feature: "Starting today, whenever I like a video, a bar pops up at the bottom of the page to tell me it was added to liked videos (a reminder that I don't need) - and then that bar freezes my browser and I can only close it with ctrl+alt+delete."

YouTube should fix the bugs and add an option to disable the bar. You can report this problem by clicking on "report a bug" at the bottom of the page.

YouTube's HTML5 Player Trial

YouTube might default to the the HTML5 player even if you haven't enabled the experimental feature. If you're using a supported browser (the latest versions of Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE9 beta, Firefox 4 beta), YouTube could test the new player.

"You are in a trial for HTML5 video on YouTube. Some users of supported browsers are automatically entered in to the trial. If you wish to leave the trial, use the link at the bottom. HTML5 is a new browser technology that allows us to show videos without the Flash plugin," explains YouTube.

If you right-click on the video, you'll see a menu that offers two options: "save video as" and "about HTML5". You might assume that "save video as" lets you download the video, but it actually sends you to this video.

Download YouTube Captions

Let's say that you've watched Eric Schmidt's keynote from TechCrunch Disrupt and you want to share some interesting ideas from the video. Fortunately, the video has closed captions and there's also an interactive transcript, but there's no way to copy the text.

The good news is that you can download the captions file if you know the URL: http://video.google.com/timedtext?lang=en&v=VIDEO_ID, where you should replace VIDEO_ID with the ID of the YouTube video. Here's the captions file for Eric Schmidt's keynote.

It's an XML file and you can extract plain text by removing all the tags. Right-click on the page, select "view source", copy all the text and paste it on this page.

Now it's easy to copy an excerpt from the keynote:

We have one of the largest databases of information in the world which we've engineered and which is very, very difficult technologically in order to house all that information and ready for more. So, where do we go next with search? Well, you've got personal contacts, personal emails, personal network of people and your relationships with them, and with your permission -- and I need to say that about 500 times -- with your permission, we can actually search and index that information and make all of these answers so much better. The next step after that is obviously autonomous search. This is searches that you're -- that are occurring while you're not even doing searching.

$10 million for Project 10^100 winners

Two years ago today, we began Project 10^100 by asking you to share your ideas for changing the world by helping as many people as possible. Your spirit and participation surpassed even our most optimistic expectations. People from more than 170 countries submitted more than 150,000 ideas. We selected 16 big ideas and asked the public to vote for their favorites. The five ideas that received the most votes are the winners of the Project 10^100. Over the past 12 months, we’ve reviewed concrete proposals to tackle these ideas, and today we’re pleased to give a total of $10 million to five inspiring organizations working on solutions to each of these global challenges:

Idea: Make educational content available online for free
Project funded: The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization that provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos. We are providing $2 million to support the creation of more courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages.

Idea: Enhance science and engineering education
Project funded: FIRST is a non-profit organization that promotes science and math education around the world through team competition. Its mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders by giving them real world experience working with professional engineers and scientists. We are providing $3 million to develop and jump start new student-driven robotics team fundraising programs that will empower more student teams to participate in FIRST.

Idea: Make government more transparent
Project funded: Public.Resource.Org is a non-profit organization focused on enabling online access to public government documents in the United States. We are providing $2 million to Public.Resource.Org to support the Law.Gov initiative, which aims to make all primary legal materials in the United States available to all.

Idea: Drive innovation in public transport
Project funded: Shweeb is a concept for short to medium distance, urban personal transport, using human-powered vehicles on a monorail. We are providing $1 million to fund research and development to test Shweeb’s technology for an urban setting.

Idea: Provide quality education to African students
Project funded: The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is a center for math and science education and research in Cape Town, South Africa. AIMS’ primary focus is a one-year bridge program for recent university graduates that helps build skills and knowledge prior to master's and Ph.D. study. We are providing $2 million to fund the opening of additional AIMS centers to promote graduate level math and science study in Africa.

Here’s a short video celebrating the inspiring work of these organizations:

We’ve learned that it takes quite a bit of effort and time to move from 150,000 ideas to five funded projects, but are excited about the potential of the ideas and projects you helped us choose. We’re happy to conclude Project 10^100 with today’s announcement of five winning ideas and encourage you to follow the progress of these projects on the organizations’ websites.

It's Easier to Add YouTube Videos to Playlists

YouTube added more features to the "plus" button displayed when you mouse over a video thumbnail. Until now, the button could only be used to add videos to a queue, so you can play them later. If you click on the small arrow next to the button, you can add the video to your favorites or to one of your playlists. It's much easier to build the playlists from search results and from the related videos.

Another change is that the "save to" drop-down has been replaced with a button that adds the video you're currently watching to the queue. Click on the arrow next to the button and you can add the video to a playlist.

When you add a video to the queue, YouTube shows a small bar that lets you manage the videos from the queue, save them as a new playlist, disable autoplay or load one of your playlists.

YouTube Live Streaming

YouTube started to test a new platform for the live streaming. "Starting at 8:00 a.m. PT, we will begin a limited trial of a new live streaming platform in the conjunction with four of our partners: How cast, Next New Networks, Rocket boom and Young Hollywood. This new platform integrates with live streaming directly into YouTube channels; all broadcasters need is a webcam or external USB/FireWire camera."

YouTube says that live streaming is "a natural evolution to online video that adds an extra level of the engagement", but this is also a feature that could make the YouTube's integration with the Google TV even more useful. YouTube wants to become the central hub for the online video, so it now focuses on adding more premium content: live events, music videos, movies and TV shows, movie rentals.

YouTube Tests Tag Refinements

YouTube experiments with a new search results page that lets you to refine results by selecting the related tags. For example, if you search for the [race car], YouTube shows a list of popular tags related to your query: #autos & vehicles, #indycar, #cars, #wreck, #car crashes etc. YouTube also shows the list of the tags for each search result.

If you click on one of the tags, you'll restrict the list of the search results to videos that have a certain tag.

YouTube doesn't use only user-defined tags, some of the tags are video properties (#hd, #fresh), tags used in the comments (#omg, #lol, #wtf, #ftw, #fail, #cute), usernames.

YouTube Increases Video Length Limit to 15 Minutes

YouTube decided to increase the video length and limit from 10 minutes to 15 minutes. It may seem like a small change, but YouTube is testing the waters before dropping this limitation.

"Without question, the number one requested feature by our creators is to upload videos longer than 10 minutes. We've heard you, and today we're pleased to announce that we've increased the upload limit to 15 minutes," informs YouTube's blog.

The main reason why YouTube added a 10 minutes limitation back in the 2006 was that a lot of users uploaded full-length movies and TV shows. Now that YouTube uses a content identification software and Viacom lost the case against YouTube, Google's video site can safely remove this from arbitrary limitation. YouTube is cautious, so it will release incremental improvements.

"We've spent significant resources on creating and improving in our state-of-the-art Content ID system and many other powerful tools for copyright owners. Now, all of the major U.S. movie studios, music labels and over 1,000 other global partners are used Content ID to manage their content on YouTube. Because of the success of these ongoing technological efforts, we are able to increase the upload limit today," explains YouTube.

YouTube Leanback

YouTube released now a preview of the Google TV interface: it's called as YouTube Leanback. "YouTube Leanback is all about letting you to sit back, relax and be entertained. Videos tailored to your interests play as soon as then you visit the site and they play in full screen and high definition, continuously. There's no need to click, search, or browse, unless you want to, of course. Watching YouTube becomes as easy as watching TV," suggests YouTube's blog.

By default, YouTube plays videos from your subscriptions, but you can also select a category to play the popular comedy videos, short films, music videos, news, travel videos and more. The interface doesn't work with a mouse, as you can only use the arrow keys and then Enter to skip a video, select a category, search, pause or resume a video. YouTube Leanback will work well with the Google TV's remote control, but you can also install an application like Air Mouse on your mobile phone.

Leanback is not the first YouTube interface designed for TVs: there's also YouTube XL, but the interface isn't fluid and there are too many options that get in the way.

Better YouTube Mobile

Google's services have a big advantage: a lot of mobile phones now include applications for services like YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Search. Unfortunately, the native applications are now rarely updated, so users miss the new features added to Google's services.

A good example is the YouTube application for iPhone, developed by the Apple, which still uses 5-star ratings, doesn't support captions, annotations or search suggestions and offers with a single sharing option: email. Google's YouTube application for Android is not much better, even if it's updated faster.

Web applications evolve faster, as they aren't updated only when a new version of the iOS or Android is released. The latest update of the YouTube Mobile site shows that a web application can be almost as good as a native application, even when you're talking about the mobile phone.

"We launched YouTube on the mobile devices in 2007 with about 1,000 videos available on the mobile site (m.youtube.com). While this suddenly opened up the possibility to access videos on the go, our site, mobile browsers and the hardware had limitations that prevented the mobile experience from keeping up with YouTube on the desktop. Today, more than ever, we know that you want to be able to find and access your favorite videos wherever you are. That's why we're rolling out and on updated version of the mobile site," explains YouTube's blog.

The latest update adds features like search suggestions, replaces ratings with like/dislike buttons, adds the option to create playlists and to watch a high-quality version of a video even if you don't use WiFi. The site loads faster and it's easier to use on a touchscreen. "As we make improvements to Youtube.com, you’ll see them quickly follow on our mobile site, unlike native apps which are not updated as frequently."

YouTube Adds Vuvuzela Button

YouTube's player added a new button for playing a vuvuzela sound file. If you watch the World Cup football matches on TV and you're missing the loud vuvuzela noise when you're watching YouTube videos, there's a new button for you.

"The vuvuzela is a typical 65 cm (2 ft) plastic blowing horn that produces a loud, distinctive monotone B♭3 note. The vuvuzela is most used at soccer matches in South Africa, and it has become a symbol of South African soccer as the stadiums are filled with its loud and raucous sound that reflects the exhilaration of supporters," informs Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, if you click on the vuvuzela button, you might not be able to hear the original sound of the video. YouTube has an option that provides automatic captions for videos, but the results are rarely accurate.