YouTube Instant

Last updated
YouTube Instant
Developer(s) Feross Aboukhadijeh
Initial release10 September 2010 (2010-09-10)
Written in JavaScript, jQuery
Available inEnglish
Website ytinstant.com

YouTube Instant [1] is a real-time search engine built and launched in September 2010 by nineteen-year-old [2] college student and Facebook-software-engineer intern [3] Feross Aboukhadijeh of Stanford University that allows its users to search the YouTube video database as they type. It follows on the heels of Google Instant, [4] and has been described as a "novelty toy", [5] a "prototypal digit to tie the "instant" bandwagon" [6] as well as a "completely excellent way to waste 15 minutes". [7]

Contents

Aboukhadijeh was offered a job from YouTube CEO Chad Hurley shortly after he created the site. [8] [9] [10] [11] At the point of YouTube Instant's creation, Aboukhadijeh was a summer intern at Facebook, [2] and has said that he was working on a secret Facebook project. [3]

Origins

The launch of YouTube Instant was announced by Aboukhadijeh on Y Combinator’s Hacker News feed. It is modelled after Google Instant — as a user types in the video they are looking for, "the engine guesses the video and begins playing it immediately."

The project started off as a bet with his college roommate. Aboukhadijeh was quoted as saying, "It started out as a bet with my roommate, Jake Becker. I bet him I could build real-time YouTube search in less than an hour." [12] Aboukhadijeh lost the bet, for it took him three hours to complete the site, and another couple hours to polish it. Aboukhadijeh said he found it "surprisingly easy to build".

Aboukhadijeh built the site by using the YouTube API. He scraped YouTube search suggestions because Google blocked his server for making far too many repeated requests to the search suggestion endpoint. [13] Aboukhadijeh had to re-write the site to instead query YouTube directly for search suggestions, "eliminating the round-trip to [his] server", in order to address the problem. [14]

Description

The YouTube Instant interface, which looks similar to the YouTube front page consists of a box designed for a user to type in his search letter or phrase. As each letter of the search phrase is typed in, the server goes out into "YouTube video land" and tries to find matches for the search term similarly to current Google Instant search.

YouTube Instant is essentially a free utility that strips down the normal YouTube interface to easily include a search bar, as well as a single and central video display as well as five smaller displays below it to present the top five searches based on the user's input. As the user types in text into the search bar, YouTube Instant instantly identifies a best match and, after a short pause to confirm that the user is happy with the match, plays the video in the central display. Beneath this, users are also presented with a smaller version of the file that is being played with a simple play and pause function as well as four other strong matches that the user can opt to select and play in the central panel instead.

YouTube Instant, as Aboukhadijeh said, would be most useful when one is "looking for a serendipitous video browsing experience". [15] In comparison with Google Instant, it might not be as useful if "you know exactly what you’re looking for, since you’re shown distracting YouTube videos on the way to your destination", said Aboukhadijeh. [15] He continues by saying that he thinks this is perfect for many internet users. [15]

YouTube Instant presents itself as a "streamlined, neatly presented microcosm" of the YouTube universe, which provides a simple and effective means of finding and playing a specific file. Like Google Instant, as soon as the user starts typing into the search bar, the utility looks for matches, and presents a file name to the right of the bar (in a distinctive and quite stylish script), which changes as you continue to type, predicting the best fit based on your input. It is virtually ‘instant’, as the name would suggest, and greatly reduces the time taken to find a file compared to the full version of YouTube.

Limitations

YouTube Instant possesses very little of the functionality offered by YouTube. Both the name of the file and the user name of the individual that uploaded it are not shown to the user. Also, there are no account-based features either, so the user cannot, for example, log into his/her existing YouTube account and add a file to his/her favorites.

Public response

Aboukhadijeh was quoted as saying "there was craziness," describing the response [16] [17] [18] [19] to the creation of YouTube Instant. And by "craziness," Aboukhadijeh referred to the viral whirlwind [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] that was generated: he was greeted by e-mails congratulating him, [27] interview requests, and a server flooded with Web traffic. Within six days, YouTube Instant had seen 715,000 visitors. [3] There was news coverage by media outlets [28] such as the New York Times , Sydney Morning Herald , and Washington Post . Perhaps one of the puzzles of the buzz that YouTube Instant has created is how YouTube Instant went viral. "I think after things cool down a bit, I should carefully consider how exactly YouTube Instant went viral and write up a blog post to share my thoughts about it all," Aboukhadijeh has said. [3]

Meeting with Chad Hurley

Most notable was the job offer from YouTube CEO Chad Hurley via Twitter. [29] "Want a Job?" Hurley asked, to which Aboukhadijeh, who uses the Twitter handle FreeTheFeross, [30] replied, "Is that a for-real offer?" Hurley then asked if Aboukhadijeh was "ready to leave school." [31] A meeting between Aboukhadijeh and Hurley at YouTube's San Bruno, California, headquarters was scheduled for September 13, 2010. [14] [32] Aboukhadijeh stated "I haven't actually accepted the YouTube offer yet. We're still figuring out how this is all going to work out, and nothing's final yet. However, Chad and the engineers I spoke with were excited about the possibilities." [3] MediaMemo however claimed that Aboukhadijeh "can't go work for Chad Hurley, because he’s already working for Mark Zuckerberg". [33] Aboukhadijeh disagreed with this claim, telling CNN that he did not see how working at Facebook over summer would "prohibit his taking a job at YouTube". [34]

Spin-offs

There was suddenly a rush to develop an ‘Instant’ version of every popular online brand. Shortly after the creation of YouTube Instant came the creation of Google Maps Instant, [35] iTunes Instant, [36] Instant Dictionary, [37] Instant PubMed, [38] WikInstant.com, [39] Instant Wikipedia. [40] In particular, it was Michael Hart [41] who put Google Images Instant together in less than two hours. He accompanied both apps with a notice that says: "Btw, Google: I’m looking for a job too! Congrats Feross Aboukhadijeh!", a direct reference to YouTube Co-Founder and CEO Chad Hurley's public job offer to the person behind YouTube Instant. [41] It was Scottish engineer Tam Denholm who decided to wrap another layer around the concept of "instantization" by creating a mashup of these services called "Instantise," "which slaps all instant-based Web activity onto a single landing page for easier discovery and use." [42]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Search</span> Search engine from Google

Google Search is a search engine operated by Google. It allows users to search for information on the Internet by entering keywords or phrases. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze and rank websites based on their relevance to the search query. It is the most popular search engine worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google</span> American multinational technology company

Google LLC is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" and is one of the world's most valuable brands due to its market dominance, data collection, and technological advantages in the field of AI. Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., is one of the five Big Tech companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">YouTube</span> Video-sharing platform owned by Google

YouTube is an American online video sharing platform owned by Google. Accessible worldwide, YouTube was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States, it is the second most visited website in the world, after Google Search. As of January 2024, YouTube has more than 2.7 billion monthly users, who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos every day. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and as of 2021, there were approximately 14 billion videos in total.

Google and its subsidiary companies, such as YouTube, have removed or omitted information from its services in order to comply with company policies, legal demands, and government censorship laws.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jawed Karim</span> American co-founder of YouTube (born 1979)

Jawed Karim is an American software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of YouTube and the first person to upload a video to the site. The site's inaugural video, "Me at the zoo", uploaded on April 23, 2005, has been viewed over 327 million times as of July 9, 2024. During Karim's time working at PayPal, where he met fellow YouTube co-founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, he designed many of its core components, including its real-time anti-fraud system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chad Hurley</span> American businessman and co-founder of YouTube (born 1977)

Chad Meredith Hurley is an American webmaster and businessman who serves as the advisor and former chief executive officer (CEO) of YouTube. He also co-founded MixBit, a since closed video sharing service. In October 2006, he and Steve Chen sold YouTube for $1.65 billion to Google. Hurley worked in eBay's PayPal division—one of his tasks involved designing the original PayPal logo—before co-founding YouTube with fellow PayPal colleagues Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. Hurley was primarily responsible for the tagging and video-sharing aspects of YouTube.

Vimeo, Inc. is an American video hosting, sharing, services provider, and broadcaster headquartered in New York City. Vimeo focuses on the delivery of high-definition video across a range of devices. Vimeo's business model is through software as a service (SaaS). They derive revenue by providing subscription plans for businesses and content creators. Vimeo provides its subscribers with tools for video creation, editing, and broadcasting, enterprise software solutions, as well as the means for video professionals to connect with clients and other professionals. As of December 2021, the site has 260 million users, with around 1.6 million subscribers to its services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lisa Donovan</span> American YouTuber

Lisa Donovan is an American former YouTuber. She is a founder of Zappin Productions, a production company that specialized in viral videos, as well as the founder and CEO of The Pattern, an astrology-based personality app.

Criticism of Google includes concern for tax avoidance, misuse and manipulation of search results, its use of others' intellectual property, concerns that its compilation of data may violate people's privacy and collaboration with the US military on Google Earth to spy on users, censorship of search results and content, its cooperation with the Israeli military on Project Nimbus targeting Palestinians and the energy consumption of its servers as well as concerns over traditional business issues such as monopoly, restraint of trade, antitrust, patent infringement, indexing and presenting false information and propaganda in search results, and being an "Ideological Echo Chamber".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of YouTube</span>

YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California, founded by three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion, since which it operates as one of Google's subsidiaries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">LeapFish</span>

LeapFish.com was a search aggregator that retrieved results from other portals and search engines, including Google, Bing and Yahoo!, and also search engines of blogs, videos etc. It was a registered trademark of Dotnext Inc, launched on 3 November 2008.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DuckDuckGo</span> American software company and Web search engine

DuckDuckGo is an American software company that offers a number of products intended to help people protect their online privacy. The flagship product is a search engine that has been praised by privacy advocates. Subsequent products include extensions for all major web browsers and a custom DuckDuckGo web browser.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Salar Kamangar</span> Iranian-American businessman, former CEO of YouTube

Salar Kamangar is an Iranian-American senior executive at Google and former CEO of Google's YouTube brand.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pinterest</span> American photo sharing platform

Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information like recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the internet using images and, on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards. Created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, Pinterest, Inc. is headquartered in San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Wojcicki</span> American business executive (born 1968)

Susan Diane Wojcicki is an American business executive who was the chief executive officer (CEO) of YouTube from 2014 to 2023. Her net worth was estimated at $765 million in 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">YouTube copyright strike</span> Website policy action

YouTube copyright strike is a copyright policing practice used by YouTube for the purpose of managing copyright infringement and complying with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA is the basis for the design of the YouTube copyright strike system. For YouTube to retain DMCA safe harbor protection, it must respond to copyright infringement claims with a notice and take down process. YouTube's own practice is to issue a "YouTube copyright strike" on the user accused of copyright infringement. When a YouTube user gets hit with a copyright strike, they are required to watch a warning video about the rules of copyright and take trivia questions about the danger of copyright. A copyright strike will expire after 90 days. However, if a YouTube user accumulates three copyright strikes within those 90 days, YouTube terminates that user's YouTube channel, including any associated channels that the user have, removes all of their videos from that user's YouTube channel, and prohibits that user from creating another YouTube channel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">WebTorrent</span> Peer-to-peer web-based torrent client

WebTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming torrent client written in JavaScript, from the same author, Feross Aboukhadijeh, of YouTube Instant, and the team at WebTorrent and on GitHub, for use in web browsers, as well as a WebTorrent Desktop stand alone version able to bridge WebTorrent and BitTorrent serverless networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">YouTube Shorts</span> Reel sharing platform within Youtube

YouTube Shorts is the short-form section of the American online video-sharing platform YouTube. Shorts focuses on vertical videos that are less than 60 seconds of duration and various features for user interaction. As of May 2024, Shorts have collectively earned over 5 trillion views since the platform was made available to the public on July 13, 2021, which include video views that pre-date the YouTube Shorts feature. Creators earn money based on the amount of views they receive, or through ad revenue. The increased popularity of YouTube Shorts has led to concerns about addiction for teenagers.

References

  1. ↑ "Youtube Instant". Ghacks.net. 11 September 2010. Retrieved 2010-09-12.
  2. 1 2 "Student Creator of 'YouTube Instant' Offered YouTube Job". digitalmediawire. Retrieved 2010-09-12.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 "YouTube Instant Creator Worked on Secret Facebook Project" . Retrieved 2010-09-12.
  4. ↑ Blodget, Henry (September 10, 2010). "YouTube Instant". Businessinsider.com. Retrieved 2010-09-12.
  5. ↑ Ehrlich, Brenna (2010-09-10). "Google Instant Is Cool, But Check Out YouTube Instant". Mashable.com. Retrieved 2010-09-12.
  6. ↑ Kafka, Peter. "A Completely Excellent Way to Waste 15 Minutes: "YouTube Instant"" . Retrieved 2010-09-12.
  7. ↑ Beckham, John (2010-09-16). "YouTube Instant and Instant Search For Images & Google Maps". ICT Magazine. Archived from the original on 2011-07-05.
  8. ↑ John 10:10 AM (CST). "[H]ard|OCP - Youtube and Maps Instant". Hardocp.com. Archived from the original on 2012-09-10. Retrieved 2010-09-12.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  9. ↑ Lynley, Matthew (September 10, 2010). "Stanford student creates YouTube Instant, gets job offer from YouTube CEO". VentureBeat. Retrieved 2010-09-12.
  10. ↑ Lynley, Matthew (September 10, 2010). "Instant student creates YouTube and contacted via Twitter to work on the video site" . Retrieved 2010-09-12.
  11. ↑ "College Kid Makes 'YouTube Instant,' Gets Instant YouTube Job Offer". Gawker.com. Retrieved 2010-09-12.
  12. ↑ Kwek, Glenda (2010-09-13). "Instant fame: how to get a job ... without even searching". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2010-09-12.
  13. ↑ "Google Instant Search to be Introduced on New Sites by Third-Party Mashups". Weeble. Retrieved 2010-09-13.
  14. 1 2 "'YouTube Instant' creator finds instant fame". cnet news. Retrieved 2010-09-13.
  15. 1 2 3 "Stanford student launches YouTube Instant". Computers & Technology: Internet. 2010-09-12. Archived from the original on 2010-09-13. Retrieved 2010-09-12.
  16. ↑ "College Kid Makes 'YouTube Instant,' Gets Instant YouTube Job Offer" . Retrieved 2010-09-16.
  17. ↑ Lynley, Matthew (2010-09-10). "Stanford Student Creates YouTube Instant, Gets Job Offer From YouTube CEO". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-09-16.
  18. ↑ "Top Technology News: Stanford student gets instant fame with YouTube Instant". 13 September 2010. Retrieved 2010-09-16.
  19. ↑ "YouTube Instant Developed by Stanford Junior" . Retrieved 2010-09-16.
  20. ↑ "Youtube Instant" . Retrieved 2010-09-16.
  21. ↑ "'YouTube Instant' creator finds instant fame".
  22. ↑ "YouTube Instant". Business Insider . Retrieved 2010-09-16.
  23. ↑ "'YouTube Instant' Creator Still in College, Nabs Job Offer Via Twitter" . Retrieved 2010-09-16.
  24. ↑ "Uni Student Makes YouTube Instant, Gets Instant YouTube Job Offer" . Retrieved 2010-09-16.
  25. ↑ "Cómo hacerse famoso y humillar a YouTube en tres horas" . Retrieved 2010-09-16.
  26. ↑ "YouTube Instant delivers your gratification even more quickly" . Retrieved 2010-09-16.
  27. ↑ "A College Student Develops Youtube Instant". 16 September 2010. Retrieved 2010-09-16.
  28. ↑ "AddTV: Student creates YouTube Instant". YouTube . Archived from the original on 2021-12-21. Retrieved 2010-09-12.
  29. ↑ "Top Technology News: Stanford student gets instant fame with YouTube Instant". NJ.com. 13 September 2010. Retrieved 2010-09-20.
  30. ↑ "Stanford student creates YouTube Instant, gets job offer from YouTube CEO". 10 September 2010. Retrieved 2010-09-13.
  31. ↑ "Feross.org" . Retrieved 2010-09-13.
  32. ↑ Go Viral on Youtube
  33. ↑ ""YouTube Instant" Dude Can't Go to Work for Chad Hurley, Because He's Already Working for Mark Zuckerberg" . Retrieved 2010-09-12.
  34. ↑ "'YouTube Instant' creator, 19, finds instant fame" . Retrieved 2010-09-12.
  35. ↑ "YouTube Instant and Google Maps Instant Follow in Google Instant's Footsteps". Lifehacker.com. 2010-09-11. Retrieved 2010-09-20.
  36. ↑ "iTunes Goes Instant, Thanks to 15-Year-Old". Fast Company. Retrieved 2010-09-13.
  37. ↑ "Instantly look up definitions & word meanings!". Instantionary.com. Retrieved 2010-09-20.
  38. ↑ "Search PubMed Instantly!". PMinstant.com. Retrieved 2010-09-20.
  39. ↑ "Search Wikipedia Instantly!". WikInstant.com. Retrieved 2010-09-20.
  40. ↑ "Search Wikipedia as you type!". The Instant Wiki. Retrieved 2010-09-20.
  41. 1 2 "Google Maps and Images Get the (Unofficial) Instant Treatment". Fast Company. 11 September 2010. Retrieved 2010-09-13.
  42. ↑ Murphy, David (2010-09-12). "'Instantise' Combines Most Popular 'Instant' Search Spin-offs". PCMAG. Retrieved 2010-09-13.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.