[UPDATE: My colleague Ed Oswald reminds me that we covered this a month ago. It sounded familiar…]

TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington has pointed out a new feature in embedded YouTube videos I hadn’t noticed: a search bar. Mike thinks it’s ugly. I wouldn’t argue that it’s gorgeous, but it’s kind of handy, since it turns every embedded YouTube clip into a mini-YouTube that lets you rummage through the video site’s entire addictive cornucopia of stuff without leaving the site you were on in the first place.

Rather than trying to explain this, I can give you a video and let you try searching right now. Look, here you go:

If, after watching the Shatner Vic-20 ad above, you got in the mood to watch more commercials with Bill, you’d do a search something like the one below. And could watch several hundred clips without ever leaving Technologizer. (The image below is just an image, not live YouTube–as far as I know, you can’t embed search results, although it would be nifty if you could.)

(You know, I kinda liked Shatner-as-spokesman better back when having William Shatner in your ad wasn’t in itself some sort of allegedly hip, postmodern statement.)

On today’s Web, when a lot of the content and functionality on sites such as Technologizer is really someone else’s embedded service, it’s easy for those of us who do the embedding to feel proprietary and paranoid about changes: All the millions of YouTube videos that folks have incorporated over the past few years now have that search bar, whether we embedders want it there or not. But what really matters is whether YouTube watchers like the new search feature. And I bet they will…

 
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