Video streaming site, YouTube recently announced two new features that is prompted in a way to allow people easily located the content they are looking for on the platform: Visual search features and easier discovery of foreign language videos that have captions in the user’s local language.
Now, YouTube users can hover over a video’s thumbnail and watch a brief clip play on their desktop computers, with thefunctionality set to be extended to mobile users with the added ability to browse the chapters within a video. Users can jump directly to the chapter they’re most interested in from the search page.
“Let’s say you’re looking for a good sour dough recipe and want to work on your kneading technique. With these new search results, you can see all the steps in the video, from feeding the starter to pulling the bread out of the oven – and skip right to the chapter on kneading,” wrote Pablo Paniagua, director of product Management, in a blog post.
As long as the video has captioning available in their language, the other product update recommends videos in other languages to the user. Therefore, to extend YouTube’s sourdough example, if you speak Icelandic and can’t find a good sourdough tutorial in your language, YouTube might recommend an English – language tutorial with Icelandic subtitles. For a start, YouTube will supplement search results with English – language videos, but it plans to expand to more languages.
YouTube is also testing a feature to complement search results with links to other sites from Google Search, in India and Indonesia.
“Not all searchers may have enough high-quality or relevant video content to fully address what you’re looking for,” Paniagua explained.
A feature that let users skip to select moments in a video is already available on Google Search. As at late last year, Google (parent company to YouTube) experimented with a mobile search feature that would recommend short-form videos from TikTok and Instagram. However, rather than opening the TikTokor Instagram apps, the video would open within the search engine to keep users on Google.
It’s good to note that these updates to YouTube’s search feature emerge in the midst of ongoing controversy around the platform’s search algorithm. Last month, Mozilla published research suggesting that YouTube algorithm continued to promote “bottom – feeding” content. Mozilla crowd-sourced data from participants who used a browser extension called RegretsReporter, which asks users to self-report YouTube videos they wish they didn’t watch. According to Mozilla report YouTube regrets were 60% higher in countries where English isn’t the primary language. Still, a representative from YouTube said that features that might potentially mitigate this – for example, recommending foreign videos with local language captions – were not developed in response to the Mozilla report.
A spokesperson from YouTube said “Our teams have been working on these features for months with the goal of helping users find what they’re looking for, from how-tos to DIYs.”
Ayoola Faseyi, an Abuja based Journalist with interest in Technology and Politics. He is a versatile writer with articles in many renowned News Journals.
He is the Co-Founder of media brand, The Vent Republic.
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