New Google Features

There are a slew of new features available for Google search and related Google applications. More after the jump.

Video Ads in YouTube

Google has finally figured out a way to serve video ads in YouTube. For videos from selected partners, YouTube now displays an ad overlay that appears about 15 seconds into the video. The overlay takes up the bottom half of the screen; you can click to close the overlay, or it will disappear on its own after 10 seconds. To view the associated ad, just click the appropriate part of the overlay.

Right now, these ad overlays are added only to videos from YouTube's major content partners, and Google shares the ad revenue with those partners. You don't have to worry about Google popping an ad onto your own personal video. (At least not yet, anyway.) The response to this development is divided -- advertisers love it, while the YouTube community hates it. And so it goes.

YouTube Videos in Your Blogger Blog

New feature in Blogger -- the ability to add YouTube videos as a sidebar element to your blog. Use the Blogger Dashboard to go to the Template tab, click Add a Page Element, and then select Video Bar. This lets you add a vertical bar of YouTube video clips, based on defined search elements.

Google Buys YouTube

You've probably heard the news already, but if not, here it is: Google is acquiring the video sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion. That's a lot of money (to you and me, anyway; less so to Google), and not everyone thinks it's a smart thing. (Mark Cuban recently stated that anyone would be a "moron" to buy YouTube, based on the huge copyright infringement liability from users posted unlicensed videos.) Google, no doubt, thinks it's a good place to sell advertising (online video ads, in particular), since that's what Google is all about. In any case, it kind of makes Google Video redundant -- or maybe Google merges both the commercial and the home-made videos together into a single site. Be interesting to watch.