This week Google started integrating thumbnails of YouTube videos in their regular search results. The effort is part of their "Universal Search." For instance, when searching for "Tablet PC videos" on Google, the second page of results includes the following link to a YouTube video:

You can click on the little expansion button in the video's link description to force the display of an integrated YouTube player, which plays the video:

Overall the implementation isn't that bad.
As I've blogged before, another great place to integrate video links is in the news page (news.google.com). When I'm checking for breaking news, I'd like to see links to live coverage of the news item, if any exist, or possibly a link to a video archive of the story--or even a hotlink to bring up a live show in Media Center or Sling Player. To do this in the general case is probably tricky, however, if Google builds relationships with broadcasters and stream providers, this could be interesting.
If I were Google, I'd also ramp up video support in its BlogSearch. Not only are there a growing number of bloggers that provide video snippets or complete shows (such as Robert Scoble), but there are now also a handful of live broadcasters, such as Chris Pirillo at http://chris.pirillo.com/live. Figuring out how to integrate in video bloggers such as these would be a way to leapfrog Google's blog search over the text-minded competition.



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