YouTube Changing Masthead to Emphasize Search

YouTube today is launching a new, more sparse masthead that brings its search box front and center. Left out of the new design is the site’s prominent “community” tab as well as its “QuickList” tool for saving videos.

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Search is Google’s core function, and it’s become quite important on YouTube as well. The site is now consistently ranked the No. 2 U.S. search engine by comScore, with 3.6 billion search queries in June compared to Yahoo’s 2.9 billion. By inching the search box from the middle-right of the page to the left, and making it bigger, YouTube hopes to bring in even more queries (and monetizable search results pages).

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Along the top of the page are the now-familiar “home,” “videos,” “shows” (the new premium content gallery), and “channels” tabs, but no longer one for “community.” Leaving out “community“? That can’t be a smart move, right? To be fair, this was kind of a strange area. It led the user to a page of contests, nearby events, groups and community help forums. And it’s hard to say YouTube, given its size, has any one monolithic community these days. The site’s social networking tools don’t seem to have been updated in years.

YouTube said its next design tweak would be around personalization tools for the masthead. We’ve given unsolicited advice in the past that the site’s next big change for search should be indexing videos from sites other than YouTube (what Google Video does now), so as to give the user more comprehensive results from around the web.

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