The AI Overviews in Google Search aim to distill down the knowledge of the web to answer your query in a few paragraphs. Now Google wants to do the same for YouTube videos.
In an update this week, Google said YouTube Premium subscribers will begin to see a new video results carousel at the top of certain searches.
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It’ll display clips from a selection of videos related to your query, Google says in a support document, helping you see lots of relevant clips without delving through loads of full videos related to your search.
“We’re experimenting with a new video results carousel that appears after entering certain search queries. This new feature will use AI to highlight clips from videos that will be most helpful for your search query, providing another way to discover content when searching on YouTube as well as discover topics and information related to your search query,” Google says in the support document.
“This is most likely to show when you search for more information about products you’re shopping for (such as “best noise cancelling headphones”), or when you search for more information about locations or things to do in those locations (such as “museums to visit in San Francisco”).”
It’s not entirely clear when the feature will be rolled out more widely, but if it works well it’s easy to envision this becoming a standard feature on Google in the next few months. Perhaps we’ll hear more at Google I/O, which starts on May 20?
Opinion
AI Overviews are already having a profound effect on web traffic, with users far less inclined to click source links and glean whatever information they need from the couple of paragraphs displayed at the top of the results page. It’s not exactly a fun feature for publishers who created the information the AI has been trained on.
Could Google possibly do the same to YouTube creators? And what effect could this have on creators when their engagement figures and ad revenue drops due to only snippets of their videos beyond shown at the top of a search result?
First they came for the writers, then they came for the videographers. What next?
