I have just noticed that Google has started including YouTube videos in their search results.

I personally am not a fan of the integration. I would like to be in control of what type of searching I want to do. I wouldn’t mind an aggregated search with multiple types of content, but the choice should be up to the user. I don’t like having certain biased / product placed content (hint: Google now owns YouTube) forced upon me.

This reminds me of the time when I noticed that Google’s results were getting cluttered with useless Myspace pages that would barely mention the search term you were looking for.
Google Images also suffered from this for awhile - they were bringing up too many Myspace pages that contained images you were searching for. The issue I had there was that, as a user, I would like to click on the image and then see other related content to my initial search term. For instance, if I do a search for Madonna in Google Images I would rather see fan sites that include a multitude of those images rather than just a Myspace page that has one Madonna image in their interests section.

In these two instances I feel that Google is lessening the overall power of their search results.

It was actually when I noticed that myspace results were taking over Google that I looked again into other search engines and discovered Snap. Snap is a post on it’s own that I will get to. I’m a creature of habit though so Google was able to win that war when I kept forgetting to go to Snap instead of Google - or when I had to change my Google homepage to be Snap and couldn’t use iGoogle any longer. What can I say, Google is the new Microsoft; just not as evil.

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