YouTube revamps content search to improve global accessibility

To make information more accessible and inclusive for all users ,YouTube has improved the content search across the globe, bringing in two updates.

In a bid to simplify the content search for viewers, YouTube has simplified the searchability of videos. YouTube has introduced new ways to help people quickly and easily search for content they're looking for whether it's tutorials, product reviews, or any other genre, based on their interests. Below are the two main fundamental changes introduced by the video platform:

Making searches more visual 

Up until now, when users browsed for a video to watch on YouTube, they’d see a thumbnail image of each video, which gives a chance to gather a quick snapshot of the video’s content. Now, they’ll be able to go through video chapters (timestamps) directly on the search page. When available, these time-stamped images detail the different topics covered in videos and let users better evaluate the video they might want to watch. Users can also jump directly to the section most relevant to their specific interests. 

If a user is looking for a step-by-step tutorial, with these new search results, users can see timestamps on all the steps in the video, and they can skip right to the chapter they were looking for.

Also Read : YouTube launches safety updates for young users

Getting a chance to see a snippet of each video can also bring helpful contexts. On desktop, users can already scroll over a video and begin to see a snippet of the content on the search page. YouTube is also rolling a version of this out to mobile to help users preview different videos.

Making more content available to everyone

Videos on YouTube may not cover every topic across every language. To address this issue, the platform will start to show search results from other languages with automatically translated captions, titles, and descriptions when relevant content in the local language isn’t available. Also, it will start supplementing search results with English videos and plan to expand to more languages. The aim is to make the global content more accessible through translated captions and help creators reach a global audience. 

YouTube recognized that not all searches may have enough high-quality or relevant video content to fully address what the user is looking for. To better surface the information, they’ve recently started experimenting with a new feature to complement search results with website links and other formats from Google Search. It’s currently available on mobile devices in India and Indonesia but will consider expanding to additional countries based on user feedback.

Recently, the platform has also announced the rollout of additional protection layers for young users, specifically those under the age of 18 consuming content on YouTube and YouTube Kids, as a preventive measure.