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Posted by Sapna Mehta, Online Operations Associate

Ever wish the sites you visit could present customized options catering to your tastes?

Our Recommended Videos feature does just that. By logging in to your Google account and visiting Google Video, you will see multiple videos that pertain to your search interests. You can find these videos underneath the hot videos section of the homepage. Just like the hot videos, you can click on the arrow buttons in the top right corner to see more recommended videos.

While our search suggestions give you search term suggestions for individual queries you enter, these video picks are based on trends of search queries you’ve used, as well as other videos that you’ve watched. It’s yet another way to discover interesting video content from across the web – this time, personalized for you.

To take advantage of this feature, you’ll be asked to sign in to Web History. It’s up to you how much customization you’d like – for example, you can choose which searches are included, and which aren’t. For more information about protecting your privacy while enjoying the benefits of personalized search, check out the following video – About Web History: Privacy.

Posted by Justin Donnelly, Software Engineer

The “Hot videos” section of the Google Video homepage offers up the web’s most popular videos, determined by how often they’re being watched, shared and blogged about across the Web. If, like me, you think this feature is awesome, you’ll love our latest update. Now, instead of only 12 hot videos, there are over a hundred available by clicking on the new pagination buttons on the upper right corner of the “Hot videos” section. Just like our TV view, the video you’re currently watching isn’t interrupted as you browse through the pages.

Note that these videos are updated throughout the day and are specific to your country. (Wondering what’s hot in the Low Countries? Try our Dutch site: http://video.google.nl/.) This expanded view of what’s hot can reveal a lot about what’s going on in online video. For example, when Weezer released their “Pork and Beans” video recently, nearly every “celebrity” featured in the video appeared in the expanded list within the next couple of days.

Give it a try- You’re sure to find something here to entertain you.

Posted by Kun Zhang, Software Engineer

The Google Video team continually strives to make your video search experience more enjoyable. In an effort to do so, we have added a suggestions feature to help you discover more interesting videos. Sometimes the suggestions expand the scope of your search, and sometimes they make your search more specific–it all depends on what you searched for and which suggestion you click on.

To view your search suggestions, click on the “Also try” links on top of the search results to refine or expand your search.

For example, if you are searching for “kittens”, you may see suggestions like “cute kittens”, “funny kittens”, “newborn kittens”, “techno kittens”, “treadmill kittens” and so on. Clicking on these suggested search terms will lead you to the respective search results page, and another set of suggestions. If you continue following through these suggestion links, your first search may very well turn into hours of exploration.

The suggestions feature is available across all views – TV view, Grid view and List view. We hope that these suggested search terms will add a few different flavors to your search experience.

Posted by Ken Harrenstien, Software Engineer

Those of you interested in closed captioning may have noticed a new feature on this front- the ability to search only for closed-captioned videos. Naturally this is very useful for people like myself who can’t hear the audio, but of course there are many others who either want the sound off or who can understand the writing better than the speech.

If you go to the “Advanced Video Search” page you’ll see a new constraint called “Subtitles: Search only closed captioned videos”. Try clicking on that check-box and doing an otherwise normal search; the results will include those videos that are known to have captions. Fun example: to see a list of all captioned videos on Google Video, check that box and restrict the domain to “google.com”.

It’s still not quite as sophisticated as we want it to be – it currently only knows about videos in Google Video, and doesn’t yet allow you to specify a language of interest. Nevertheless it’s another small step that we hope will encourage greater awareness and use of captions.

A related feature of interest that you may not have noticed is the ability to jump directly into a video at the point where captions of interest appear. If your search results include caption snippets, there will be a link called “Start playing at search term”, which is extremely handy for long videos. In order to see it, you also have to select “List View” (the middle icon in the Results menu bar).

Here’s a nice example – search for ["that's a tremendous gift"] . Make sure you’ve selected List View, and you should see a video featuring Randy Pausch. Clicking on the “Start playing at search term (50:16)” link will take you to a point slightly before the appearance of that caption.

Posted by Sapna Mehta, Online Operations Associate

We know a lot of you are committed multi-taskers, and hey, who doesn’t love the TV view for efficient video searching? To make you even better multi-taskers, we’ve added a feature that allows you to browse through multiple results pages, sort, filter or refine your search query- all without interrupting the video you’re watching. The list and grid views also inherit this feature.

We hope that this feature will make your video searching and viewing more enjoyable.

Follow these steps to check it out:

1. Conduct a search using any query and click on a result to play a video.
2. While the video is playing, scroll to the bottom of the results and click back and forth between the pages of results. For example, click “Next” or “Previous”, or click on the page number.
3. You can also go to the search box at the top and perform a new search. New results will be displayed, but the current video keeps playing.