YouTube Passes Yahoo As #2 Search Engine

Dekortage writes "According to the latest ComScore rankings, YouTube's search traffic for August surpassed Yahoo's. The latter dropped roughly 5% in traffic from July. Among other things, this means that Google now owns both of the top two search engines. AdAge further speculates on Google's experimental 'promoted videos' cost-per-click advertising on YouTube, suggesting the obvious: more money."

Comments

"Search engine"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Calling YouTube a "search engine" by comparison to Google and Yahoo is...interesting. I mean, I guess it's technically true, but it's about as relevant as comparing Google with Slashdot site search.

Re:"Search engine"?

[corsec67]

Would "grep" be considered a search engine, then?

I use it to find stuff at work all the time.

Re:"Search engine"?

[DancesWithBlowTorch]

It's a rubbish use of the term. I guess Amazon might even be a bigger search engine than YouTube. Some of the big DNS servers are probably pretty big search engines as well.

What a useless way of using words.

Re:"Search engine"?

[jonbryce]

video.google.com might be a search engine, because it can find videos from multiple sites, but mainly its own and youtube, but youtube is just a website with a search facility.

Re:"Search engine"?

[4D6963]

By that standard any site with a search feature is a search engine. A search engine is really something that provides search results from other sites, not its own site.

Re:"Search engine"?

[2nd Post!]

Only true if Amazon traffic was higher than YouTube traffic :)

Essentially the point is that more people are searching within YouTube for videos than within Yahoo!, for everything. Which says something about marketshare. Even Amazon is listed, and it ranks below Microsoft's Live search site.

Re:"Search engine"?

[Rary]

youtube is just a website with a search facility.

Google is also a website with a search facility.

YouTube is a website with the ability to search its content. Google is a website with the ability to search other sites' content.

Basically, Google is a search engine, and YouTube has a search engine.

YouTube is not a search engine

[alex_vegas]

People who search on yahoo are not looking to stay at yahoo. People who search at youtube are looking to stay at youtube. This story is bogus.

Re:YouTube is not a search engine

[Facegarden]

The story isn't bogus... If a general purpose search site that searches the whole web, and used to be number one, now gets fewer searches than a single-purpose video search site, it really underscores how low yahoo has fallen!
-Taylor

Competition

[Wiarumas]

But is YouTube in competition with Yahoo? This is apples and oranges. Nothing to see here folks, move along.

What?

[clarkkent09]

When I am on Youtube I typically perform several searches and stay on Youtube the whole time. On the other hand when I go to a search engine I typically perform one search and click on one of the results and leave the search site. As somebody else pointed out the media company bots must be constantly searching Youtube for certain keywords to identify copyright violations. The whole comparison is nonsense.

Last I heard Yahoo still beats both Google and Youtube in total number of unique visitors and that is the stat that matters to advertisers.