YouTube Gets Geographical Search

July 16th, 2008

YouTube the world’s most popular video sharing site, will soon offer its viewers the ability to locate the local videos that they are interested in via a geographical search function.

Viewers will be able to find a video that is related to a particular location. YouTube’s product manager Brian Glick, made this announcement during a developer talk session, in San Bruno, California. This feature is already in being trialled in beta and is due for a general launch shortly.

During the developer talk, a demonstration of this feature was presented, using a video connected to the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas as an example.

According to the NewTeeVee blog, users who search for videos on YouTube with a location in the query string will be shown a map icon at the top of the results. Clicking on that map will produce a list of videos connected to that location. It is also possible to narrow the search further, by entering a specific place in that location, such as the name of a garden or a hotel.

Geo-search results on YouTube

About a year ago, YouTube added the geotag option to its videos, which could be specified by creators at the time of uploading, but there was no information about how the geotags were used.The geo-search functional finally makes good use of this feature.
Geo-tagging of YouTube videos is also available on Google Earth, for a few selected videos. Google Maps also shows YouTube videos. The feature will probably be used in the future to allow advertisers to target video ads on YouTube by geography.

Tags: search, video advertising, youtube