YouTube Passes Yahoo As #2 Search Engine

Dekortage writes "According to the latest ComScore rankings, YouTube's search traffic for August surpassed Yahoo's. The latter dropped roughly 5% in traffic from July. Among other things, this means that Google now owns both of the top two search engines. AdAge further speculates on Google's experimental 'promoted videos' cost-per-click advertising on YouTube, suggesting the obvious: more money."

"Search engine"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Calling YouTube a "search engine" by comparison to Google and Yahoo is...interesting. I mean, I guess it's technically true, but it's about as relevant as comparing Google with Slashdot site search.

YouTube is not a search engine

[alex_vegas]

People who search on yahoo are not looking to stay at yahoo. People who search at youtube are looking to stay at youtube. This story is bogus.

Competition

[Wiarumas]

But is YouTube in competition with Yahoo? This is apples and oranges. Nothing to see here folks, move along.

What?

[clarkkent09]

When I am on Youtube I typically perform several searches and stay on Youtube the whole time. On the other hand when I go to a search engine I typically perform one search and click on one of the results and leave the search site. As somebody else pointed out the media company bots must be constantly searching Youtube for certain keywords to identify copyright violations. The whole comparison is nonsense.

Last I heard Yahoo still beats both Google and Youtube in total number of unique visitors and that is the stat that matters to advertisers.

Re:"Search engine"?

[corsec67]

Would "grep" be considered a search engine, then?

I use it to find stuff at work all the time.

Re:"Search engine"?

[DancesWithBlowTorch]

It's a rubbish use of the term. I guess Amazon might even be a bigger search engine than YouTube. Some of the big DNS servers are probably pretty big search engines as well.

What a useless way of using words.

Re:"Search engine"?

[jonbryce]

video.google.com might be a search engine, because it can find videos from multiple sites, but mainly its own and youtube, but youtube is just a website with a search facility.

Re:"Search engine"?

[4D6963]

By that standard any site with a search feature is a search engine. A search engine is really something that provides search results from other sites, not its own site.

Re:YouTube is not a search engine

[Facegarden]

The story isn't bogus... If a general purpose search site that searches the whole web, and used to be number one, now gets fewer searches than a single-purpose video search site, it really underscores how low yahoo has fallen!
-Taylor

Re:"Search engine"?

[2nd Post!]

Only true if Amazon traffic was higher than YouTube traffic :)

Essentially the point is that more people are searching within YouTube for videos than within Yahoo!, for everything. Which says something about marketshare. Even Amazon is listed, and it ranks below Microsoft's Live search site.

Re:"Search engine"?

[Rary]

youtube is just a website with a search facility.

Google is also a website with a search facility.

YouTube is a website with the ability to search its content. Google is a website with the ability to search other sites' content.

Basically, Google is a search engine, and YouTube has a search engine.

Re:"Search engine"?

[trentrez]

The real deal is this:

Google's search scope is "the internet"

Youtube's search scope is "videos uploaded to it's site"

How you define what 'is' a search engine or what 'has' a search engine is moot if you talk about the 'scope' in which a search is performed and then it's 'method'.

If I created a search "engine" thats scope was the internet and it used the same 'method' as google then it would give me the same results as google. Same argument goes for Youtube.

Youtube just happens to be a special case in that it is a search on a scope of video files which are a subset of it's own website. IE it searches specific conent uploaded to it's site which allows it to get added meta information from an otherwise visual medium, IE how does Google know what's in a video.. Youtube know because it asks you to tag it.

Same with Slashdot's search, It is a search on it's own content, submissions, comments etc.

Just because Google can search "outside of it's internal scope" (however that may be defined) doesn't make it any different or doesn't make Youtube any less of a search engine.

The point thus stands that this is pretty damn spectacular that Youtube which is only searching a small subset of data is being used more than Yahoo which is used to access in theory the same or a similar scope to Google, ie the internet.

How accurate the method on counting how you rate Youtube higher than Yahoo is, is open for debate. However assuming they are using the same metric they always did, according to that metric- Yahoo was above Youtube, and now it isn't. I would therefore say this is significant even if it is (without knowing exact details on how the ranking works) potentially somewhat crude.