Google Videos is geared towards providing a large archive of freely searchable videos. Besides amateur media, Internet videos, viral ads, and movie trailers, the service also aims to distribute commercial professional media, such as televised content and movies.
A number of educational discourses by Google employees have been recorded and made available for viewing via Google Videos. The lectures have been done mainly at the employees' former universities. The topics cover Google technologies and software engineering but also include other pioneering efforts by major players in the software engineering field.
The service was launched on January 25, 2005. On October 9, 2006, Google bought former competitor YouTube. Google announced on June 13, 2007 that the Google Videos search results would begin to include videos discovered by their search crawlers on other hosting services, in YouTube and user uploads. Search result links now open a frameset with a Google Videos header at the top, and the original player page below it, similar to the way the Google Images search results are presented. In 2009, Google discontinued the ability to upload videos to Google's web servers.
Google Videos also searches other non-affiliated video sites from web crawls. Sites searched by Google Videos in addition to their own videos and YouTube include GoFish, ExposureRoom, Vimeo, Myspace, Biku, and Yahoo! Video. It appears that Google Videos is moving away from an online video archive and toward a search engine for videos, similar to their web and image searches.
A number of educational discourses by Google employees have been recorded and made available for viewing via Google Videos. The lectures have been done mainly at the employees' former universities. The topics cover Google technologies and software engineering but also include other pioneering efforts by major players in the software engineering field.
The service was launched on January 25, 2005. On October 9, 2006, Google bought former competitor YouTube. Google announced on June 13, 2007 that the Google Videos search results would begin to include videos discovered by their search crawlers on other hosting services, in YouTube and user uploads. Search result links now open a frameset with a Google Videos header at the top, and the original player page below it, similar to the way the Google Images search results are presented. In 2009, Google discontinued the ability to upload videos to Google's web servers.
Google Videos also searches other non-affiliated video sites from web crawls. Sites searched by Google Videos in addition to their own videos and YouTube include GoFish, ExposureRoom, Vimeo, Myspace, Biku, and Yahoo! Video. It appears that Google Videos is moving away from an online video archive and toward a search engine for videos, similar to their web and image searches.