Google Video should merge with Youtube or at least add grid view for search results

As Google’s app and service ecosystem continues to evolve, so does Google Search. The company has put a ton of work in over the past few years to inject as much artificial intelligence and machine learning into Search itself, and as a result, I find myself relying on it more and more to find what I need instead of visiting specific apps.

One example of this is using the search bar on my phone or Chromebook to find videos instead of opening Youtube before typing in a query. Many people don’t realize this, but Google Video search is quite powerful. It searches the entire web, returning results for video across the entire internet instead of just Youtube. You can filter out video sources for Youtube alone, but the joy of the service is that you can pull from Twitter, Reddit, or really anywhere else a relevant video file is located by Google’s crawling.

Because I’m accustomed to looking at the Youtube home page so often and now that I’ve found myself scouring the Google Videos tab more via Google Search, I realized something that annoys me to no end – all of the search results on the videos tab are listed vertically!

Now, I may just be complaining a bit too much with this one, but I’m always looking for ways to improve the user experience as I use things for myself. Call it the UX designer in me, but I just can’t help it. I think that Google should consider adding a grid view option to Google Video Search results to make things much easier to visually scan. While doing so would remove the existing video description snippet from the lineup, I think it would still increase accessibility.

Because Youtube has completely transformed our understanding and use of video consumption to be about looking at a thumbnail and a title, I think the description is rather useless on most occasions. So, with that in mind, I took the liberty to make sort of a mock-up of what that would look like if the company implemented the aforementioned grid view. Check it out below!

This isn’t a perfect mock-up, as it’s just the Youtube homepage for our channel on Chrome Unboxed overlayed on the Google Video Search results page, but I think it gets the point across enough. Keep in mind that since Videos pulls from all over the web, you’d see the source, category, and the date below the thumbnails here instead of the view count and how long ago the video was posted.

Despite this, I think that something like that seen above would be a great opportunity for Google to make its Video search more useful and appealing. I understand that searching for videos on Youtube also produces a vertical list of results, but at least Youtube has a grid view for standard content. You could argue that Youtube is Google’s standard video page for content outside of Google Video Search, but that’s not exactly true as it’s only content from Youtube and not from other sources.

Also included in the ‘sort of mock-up’ above are Google’s famous ‘Suggestion chips’. Image Search also has these, so I thought they would make for a great addition here. I pulled these in to show that Video Search should also be more dynamic than it currently is.

I know it’s a minor thing, but a grid view would be a welcome addition to Google Video Search, especially as the company looks to update everything else to be more modern. Even the search bar for Videos found at “https://video.google.com” is lacking the familiar, rounded edges that you find on other Google search bars. Honestly, go look – it’s an ugly rectangle. Has Google forgotten about Video Search entirely? If so, why not just pull in other sources on Youtube and inject a mini Youtube into the Video Search tab?

I’m making a bold statement, but I think that Youtube should just replace Google Video, and include its open nature for competitors’ content. Instead of only letting you watch directly on the platform with its own hosted videos, it should also allow you to find and click thumbnails for other video sources and redirect you to the source website for viewing. Most users already go to Youtube for video searching nowadays, and it would give the rest of the web an opportunity to get more exposure through the popular video service instead of just and only through standard Search.

Youtube is the world’s second-largest search engine, after all, so why does Google Video still exist alongside it? One day, I think the company hopes to call Youtube “Google Video”, Blogger “Google Blogs”, and so on and so forth anyways, but because branding is more powerful with these popular tools, it’s not done that to date. Why not just go the opposite direction and toss Google Video into Youtube and keep the famous name?

This would probably get a little annoying for anyone who wants to remain in-house with Google’s own video platform, but I think it’s something to consider. It also sounds a little crazy, I get that, but you have to keep in mind that until 2009, users could upload content to Google Video just like Youtube – before it became just and only an aggregation tool for visual content across the web (videos were also pushed over to Youtube!).

As we said nearly three years ago, the Google Video team is now focused on tackling the challenge of video search. We want to thank the millions of people around the world who have taken the time to create and share videos on Google Video, and we hope that you will continue to share your videos on YouTube.

Youtube Blog, 2012

So, if the company wanted to merge its efforts across the board with its previous vision, it wouldn’t be all that wild. All I’m ultimately saying is that Google needs to do something to update Video Search because it’s looking kinda ugly and outdated these days, and a Youtube merger or tie-in makes the most sense from where I’m standing.