New York — So far many different search engines have attemped to bring more visual experience to search such as Quintura and Viewzi, but Google has been very cautious when it comes to visual search. Youtube is supposedly the second largest search engine that has just added an interesting new feature called “Wonder Wheer” that allows you to customize your search experience, and find better results for the videos you are looking for.
The Wonder Wheel as it is called, is a visual navigation tool that Google initially introduced on its main search page a month ago when it added some new search options a month ago, lets you browse videos through association; similar to how another cool visual discovery engine, Liveplasma, lets you discover new artists through connection with the artists you know and like.
YouTube has now incorporated this into its results as well. When you perform a search on YouTube, you may see a “Wonder Wheel” link is displayed in the top right corner of your search results, but it is present only when you get a lot of results. Clicking it will bring up something that looks like this:
For searches having less results YouTube will not suggest other searches, and the Wonder Wheel option will be absent, too. As with most other search experiments, the Wonder Wheel will not substitute the regular YouTube search, but it can be great for discovering new videos or simply killing a little time — and we all know that is what YouTube is really for.
Another addition is “Advanced Search” that has been updated, empowering users the ability to narrow down their search with time of upload, as well as its location and length. When you go to search something on YouTube, and select the “advanced options” link, you will now be presented with more options.
“Let us say you want to narrow down your search for a video and be more precise about what you are looking for,” explains the YouTube Team. “Advanced Search allows you to specify many more details than our normal search, including when a video was uploaded, the location it came from, and its length. We have worked on Advanced Search to make it easier to use and to better reflect the range of content on YouTube (lots of new stuff!).”
With Advance Search option you can also search by category, keyword, video type, and for HD videos only, but those are not new.
Other latest enhancements brought to YouTube include a remaining time display on the upload progress bar, the power to download MP4 files of your own videos, and YouTube XL, which is configured to give users a more television-like experience. YouTub’e mobile app is also now available in French, UK English, Italian, Spanish, German, and Dutch.