In case you haven’t realized over the past seven years, the vertically scrolling short video format is pretty popular. TikTok has revolutionized the way we watch content on our phones, and other companies like Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook, etc. have followed suit to further strengthen that notion. Well, Google is making it easier to find short-form videos with the Short Videos search filter.
Google is one of the main companies providing short-form videos because it owns YouTube. The video-sharing service has been pushing YouTube Shorts heavily ever since TikTok took off. In fact, the company announced that a quarter of YouTube shorts creators are receiving money for their videos. As time goes on, we expect that number to grow.
Google is testing a new Short Videos search feature on mobile
When you search for something on Google, and there are relevant video results, you’ll see them close to the top of the feed. The videos mostly consist of longer-form videos straight from YouTube, which is no issue. However, if you’re a person who can’t quite spend the time to watch a 10-minute video, and you need information wrapped in a 60-second package, then you will want to watch a short video.
Well, Google is currently working on a new filter in the Google Search app for mobile. Currently, when you search for something on YouTube, you will see the search bar up top with a horizontally scrolling carousel of chips. These chips are the search filters, and they will show your results accordingly. For example, the Images chip will show you images relative to your search, and the Shopping chip will show you where to buy what you just searched for.
Well, Google is testing a new Short Videos chip. As you can guess, this will filter your search results to show you a feed of short vertically scrolling videos. You’ll see a two-column feed of the videos. Obviously, since this is powered by Google, you should expect to see YouTube Shorts in the feed. However, it won’t exclusively show Shorts. In the screenshot below, we see that it will feature TikTok videos as well. Since we also see TikTok, we can realistically expect to see Instagram and Facebook Reels along with other short-form videos from across the web.
This is only on mobile… for now
Right now, we only have information on this tool coming to the mobile version of Google. However, it seems like Google will launch this feature on the web at some point. We will just have to wait for information on that to come out.
2024-04-08 15:06:14