• NewTeeVee, Monday, March 16, 2009 11:45 AM

YouTube is the undisputed king of online video, having recently surpassed Yahoo as the second-most popular U.S. search engine. Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee says the online video service could become an even better video search engine by linking to content that it doesn't have. So what does that mean? Imagine if a search for "The Daily Show" brought back links to full episodes viewable at TheDailyShow.com or Hulu.com instead of linking to Jon Stewart imitators or clips that YouTube was forced to remove.

As Gannes says, "Linking to outside videos would build on the search strength of YouTube parent Google and would be especially effective at compensating for YouTube's weaknesses in news, sports, and live-streaming content." She adds: "YouTube is pretty terrible when it comes to timely stuff; if they even make it to the site, news and pop culture clips are often pirated and get removed quickly."

Off-site video links would also increase the overall utility of YouTube without adding to the site's bandwidth costs, Gannes says. And a better, more comprehensive search site would make YouTube search ads, which it only recently started selling, all the more valuable.

Read the whole story at NewTeeVee »