• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, August 11, 2011

No problem is too big for Google to try to solve with an algorithm and a template. Its ambitions to get every shred of content old and new online and then slap a search box and crappy layout atop it continues to work because we are still a little dazzled by what is available online. My father, an old comedy fan of vintage performers, is amazed whenever I show him what a simple "Who's On First" or "Your Show of Shows" will render on YouTube. I can leave him for hours to get lost in the nostalgic rush and his ongoing sense of wonder about "how they got all this stuff in there."

The magic of crowdsourcing, I explain. Make it easy to share multimedia and people will. The result, however, will be uneven, inelegant and limited. As we covered yesterday in YouTube's partnership with MovieClips, the video portal clearly is trying to do two upgrades at once - incorporating more consistent, properly licensed clips for its database and creating a more attractive way of presenting media. Because at every turn the company reminds us that yes, it may well be in the content business, but it has none of the instincts, let alone style, of a major media company.

To wit: this week YouTube brought Johnny Carson into its trove. The new "Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" channel purports to bring higher, consistent quality versions of memorable show clips to the index than we have seen before. From 1962 to 1992, the decades of material includes everything from Tiny Tim singing "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" to Don Rickles tossing Mafia jokes at Frank Sinatra. Great stuff. And I am all for YouTube starting to morph into what many of us media mavens want - a usable and comprehensive museum of video media.

But dear Lord, this Carson page is just downright fugly and thoroughly uninviting. Aside from the page skin of Carson looking puckishly from the wings at the center scroll, everything above the fold is devoted to a user poll on their favorite Carson memories of the show and a self-starting video of Howie Mandel talking endlessly about his favorite clips, without any of them actually showing up. As usual with YouTube, the rail of search results is just an unmanageable and disorderly scroll that even in my Google chrome browser renders poorly. There is the cacophony of ads, from the contextually irrelevant large square to the right to some ridiculously long pre-rolls and then the frequent overlays popping up to cover a third of the screen. The only hope for order is the playlists.

But doesn't great media deserve better than this? Shouldn't certain content types like TV archives get an interface that allows for sensible searches by year, personality, guest type, etc? Should the media viewing frame for watching a classic film scene or even news interview with a world figure really be the same one we get for the 5000^th dad to get hit in the nuts with a three-year-old's wiffle bat or the dimwit skateboarding off the garage roof?

As the content itself improves on YouTube the limitations of the geeky interface and relentlessly boring layout reminds us the high price we have paid for sheer scale. It is high time the world's largest collection of digital video started learning from all the old material it collects so aggressively and well: content is a commodity; media is an experience.