11 July 2008

YouTube adds geosearch

It's something we've all done - gone on to YouTube, searched for "Paris" and instead of being presented with a list of Miss Hilton's music videos, a load of videos relating to the French capital appear. Does this mean that poor unsuspecting Francophiles are sometimes confronted with the heiress when they're least expecting it? Well, now there's a new feature to help them search more efficiently.

Around a year ago the option to geotag videos as they were uploaded was introduced - so the site knew where the video came from - but there was no way to do anything with that information on YouTube. Google Earth, however, has allowed users to search for YouTube videos that were geographically relevant for a while now.

Now, if you search for "Paris" on YouTube, on the initial page of results a little box appears at the top of the list with the option to see only videos from that location; it's a bit like when you search for "Paris" in Google and get a map of the city above the links to related sites.

If you click on this YouTube link, you will be taken to a page with a map (in case you're searching for a town with two locations - YouTube thinks Montrose is in Texas rather than Angus) with videos tagged to this location. You also have the option to refine your search for that location, so you can search for videos to do with Hilton in Paris and you get things such as 'Bouncing Balls Off Paris Hilton' (someone throwing tennis balls against the wall outside the hotel, of course) returned. It doesn't seem to work completely efficiently as of yet, as videos of the hotel heiress seem to sneak through even though some clearly state they're filmed in LA.

Not every location is set up to appear like this yet and there doesn't seem to be a clear reason why. For example, Newcastle (population slightly more than a quarter of a million) doesn't show up but Elgin (population around 25,000) does. Newcastle also returns around nine times more videos than Elgin's 4,000 videos.

Earlier this week The Wall Street Journal announced that YouTube's users now watch its videos more than one billion times most days. It's little improvements like this, along with features such as Gordon Brown answering questions set by the public, that sees YouTube continuing to grow in popularity.

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