First off, they have added keyboard navigation, so you can use Google Instant without touching your mouse, should you choose to do so. The navigation lets you scroll through Google’s search suggestions to bring up more instant results. 

Secondly, Google Instant has now been added to more of Google’s search options in the left panel, including Videos, News, Books, Blogs, Updates, and Discussions. For some reason, Images is not included.

Google also announced that Google Instant is rolling out in the domains for 12 new countries, including: Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Ukraine.

Google Instant was available for seven countries until now. 

If you’re unfamiliar with Google Video for Business, it’s part of Google Apps Premiere and Education editions, and lets users share rich video information, keep videos secure and private, and collaborate on videos.

With the speed control feature, users can click the button to switch between 1.5x and real-time or drag the pop-up slider to select the speed they want. You can also drag the position marker for the video to find specific parts of the video, and the playback speed will remain the same as what you have it set for. 

"Have you ever wanted to watch a training video, but didn’t feel you could take the time for it?" asks Daniel Steinberg of the Google Video Team. "Ever wished a slow speaker would talk just a little faster? Or maybe you’d like to skim through a presentation at high speed until you got to something really interesting."

It would be nice if Google would implement a speed control feature on YouTube videos. It would make sense given the much larger audience for these.

Captions can obviously open up communication on a whole new level with subtitles alone. This makes videos more accessible to those who cannot hear well and those who speak other languages. As far as uploading, users with Google Gears can upload videos of up to 1 GB. Before it was only 300 MB.

"This is important to businesses and schools that need to host longer form or higher quality video," the Google Video team says in a blog post. "If you’d like to upload videos of this size, simply get Google Gears or Google Chrome to enable larger uploads today."

As the company explains, Google Video for Businesses allows businesses to:

- Share rich video info, which comes in handy for internal training, corporate announcements, etc.

- Keep videos secure and private, so videos can only be shared with select employees

- Not worry about hosting large video files

- Let various people within the company collaborate through viewing and annotations. More on Google’s recommended uses in this clip:

Of course Google services’ reliability have been called into question several times in recent memory. Gmail in particular has been reported to have had some downtime – again.

Just because they’re putting a stop to uploading videos to Google Video, doesn’t mean that you can’t still submit your videos to them. By the way, Google Video Product Manager Amit Paunikar notes that Google Video search algorithms power YouTube as well as universal search.

Google has simplified the process for submitting sitemaps, and extended Video sitemaps support to include Media RSS feed. That said, Google offers the advice of including the following things in your sitemaps to make your videos easier to find:

1. Landing page URL: This is the page where the video is hosted. It’s better to have a unique landing page for each video on your site.

2. Video thumbnail URL: Thumbnails provide a strong visual cue to the user. Your video thumbnail should be representative of a snapshot from the video, and should not be misleading in any way.

3. Title & Description: If these are accurate and descriptive, they not only help Google understand your video, but also help users choose the best video search result. Providing information about category, keyword tags and duration is always helpful.

As I recently discussed, video is becoming increasingly important to search. Making it easier for Google to crawl your videos has to help.

- Uploading to Google Video
– Google Notebook
– Jaiku
– Google Catalog Search
– Mashup Editor
– Dodgeball

Now, some notes on each.

The Google Video Team is now encouraging users to upload their videos to either YouTube or Picasa, both of which are owned by Google of course. Uploading will still be available for a few months. They won’t be removing any content that is already there.

The Google Notebook team is encouraging users to try other Google Products with notebook-like functionality like SearchWiki,Google Docs, Tasks in Gmail, and Google Bookmarks. And they claim to have plenty of new ideas for these services.

Jaiku is shutting down before it ever really got going. It is a Twitter-like service that never left invite-only status. According to Read Write Web, "Google will release the Jaiku code under the open source Apache license, so that other organizations can pick up where the Google team left off. It is not clear if current users will be able to transfer their accounts."

Google Catalog Search just wasn’t popular enough to keep around, but the Book Search Team leaves it behind with fond memories. "Catalogs helped us better understand and refine the technology we use today to scan and make the full text of books available online," says Product Manager Punit Soni. "We also learned more about how users read scanned documents online, and how to best present this type of information to them."

Mashup Editor is another one that never really got off the ground. It is still only available in limited testing. Google encourages users to instead use the Google App Engine.

Dodgeball is a mobile social networking service. It will be shut down in the next couple months. Google says they will communicate the exact timeframe shortly.

A post on the Official Google Blog talks about the company consolidating some engineering offices, by shutting down Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden locations, though they say they intend to keep as many of the employees as possible, and just have them move to other locations.

"Our long-term goal is not to trim the number of people we have working on engineering projects or reduce our global presence, but create a smaller number of more effective engineering sites, which will ensure that innovation and speed remain at our core," says Google Senior Vice President, Engineering and Research Alan Eustace.

Google also announced that they are trimming some recruiting jobs – about 100 of them. "Our first step to address this was to wind down almost all our contracts with external contractors and vendors providing recruiting services for Google. However, after much consideration, we have with great regret decided that we need to go further and reduce the overall size of our recruiting organization by approximately 100 positions," says Google’s Vice President of People Operations, Laszlo Bock.

Big changes through Google’s organization today indeed. As far as the services being shut down, I can’t say that I will particularly miss any of them, as I haven’t thrown them much use anyway. Will you miss any of these services?

 Updated Google Video

The fresh version is all about "Hot videos" – these featured clips are pretty much the only things visible on the homepage.  Click on any of them, and instead of opening in a new page, they’ll start playing on the left.

Google’s got a few more tricks up its sleeve, too.  On the Google Video Blog, Greg Billock writes, "Now you can choose any of three ways to view your video search-results: a traditional list view, a grid view and, for those of you who like to maximize your video-watching efficiency, a TV view, where you can watch an embedded video while continuing to view your search results next to the video for a more seamless browse and search experience."

Also, in case you think you’ve missed something (I have to admit that, for better or for worse, I still haven’t watched Rick Astley’s "Never Gonna Give You Up"), a timeline feature lets you look at the most popular videos from the past.

Previous versions of Google Video are on display at Google Blogoscoped, if you’re looking to make any comparisons, and Billock promised that more updates will occur in the future.

Indexing text data became old hat to Google and every other search engine over the past few years. Multimedia, especially video, has everyone’s attention these days (including Hollywood screenwriters.)

To enable better video indexing, Google has taken the lead in introducing and accepting Video Sitemaps. "By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to your standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on your site, along with relevant metadata," said the Webmaster Central blog.

That does imply some extra work for the webmaster, in the need to create a second sitemap for Google to index. One commenter on the blog asked why the video elements can’t just be added to the regular sitemap, since they have their own namespace.

Google’s John Mueller replied, saying it might not be practical, but said he would pass the suggestion along.

It appears Google is acting solo in working with video sitemaps at this time. Other search engines will have to decide whether or not to follow Google’s lead in accepting this extension.

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Google Video Called On Copyright Violations

Back in July the NLPC examined the extent of copyrighted material being hosted on Google Video and released a "Top 50" list of copyrighted movies. In the latest inspection of the site, conducted from September 10 to September 18, the NLPC uncovered 300 additional instances of copyrighted films, including 60 movies released this year.

The NLPC says that the 300 pirated films have received 22 million views in the past year and that many other copyrighted works continue to show up on Google Video. Google maintains that it respects the rights of copyright holders and is developing tools for copyright holders to identify and remove their work from the site.

"While Google faces numerous legal challenges related to the posting of copyrighted content on its video sharing websites, there is also a growing chorus who believe that evidence of Google’s seemingly indifferent attitude towards Internet video piracy has resulted in a legitimization or ‘mainstreaming’ of video piracy which will have broad and damaging implications for all intellectual property owners," the letter, signed by NLPC Chairman Ken Boehm, accompanying the report reads. "We share those concerns."

Mr. Boehm’s letter also points out Google’s promise that it intends to install video filtering technology on it video sharing services. "Google has been promising video filtering technology to screen for copyrighted content since at least the fall of 2006," said Boehm.

"On July 27th of this year, Google again announced that it would launch a filtering system by September of this year to prevent pirated material from being uploaded to its YouTube video sharing site. As of this Monday however, it appeared that Google still had not implemented the promised technology either for its YouTube or Google Video sites."

Estimates of Internet piracy theft are as high as $2.3 billion in lost revenue to the U.S. film industry.

Watchdog Group Growls At Google Video

The Top 50 list includes the name of the movie or program, the production company, the number of days it has been hosted on Google Video and the number of viewers. The NLPC says all the content in the Top 50 list was still available on Monday, July 9th.

"We realize that this is probably a ‘drop in the bucket’ in ferreting out copyrighted content among the millions of videos posted on Google Video, YouTube and other popular video sites, but we hope that our efforts both raise awareness of the issue of video and music piracy and hopefully serve as a resource for copyright owners to check if their content is on the sites without their knowledge or approval," said National Legal and Policy Center’s Chairman Ken Boehm.

The NLPC says that movies like Warner Brothers Blood Diamond, Columbia’s Spiderman III and Disney films like Meet the Robinson’s as well as Cars are available on Google Video. The NLPC will update the Top 50 list periodically to expose potentially infringing content.

"It’s difficult to know for sure whether all of the content included in the Top 50 list is being hosted in violation of copyright laws – NLPC makes no assertions — but it’s a reasonable assumption that much of the content has been uploaded without the copyright owner’s knowledge or approval," added Boehm.

Google has been embroiled in a slew of copyright infringement suits over the past year, including Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit. Google has maintained they are protected under the DMCA and that they comply when asked to remove infringing content.

Michael Moore’s newest movie, “Sicko,” is set to be shown in theaters on June 29, but YouTube users got an early viewing over the weekend; the entire 124-minute film showed up on the site, with that running time split between 14 clips, according to the Associated Press.  The distributor of “Sicko” complained to YouTube, the clips were pulled, and this all might have blown over.

Yet, strangely, the same movie was discovered on Google Video, and that version wasn’t so quick to disappear.  “YouTube may have removed pirated copies of the unreleased film, Sicko, but apparently those operating [its] sister site, Google Video, didn’t get the memo,” writes Greg Sandoval.
 
“As of 10:15 a.m. Monday morning, Michael Moore’s soon-to-be released documentary was available on Google’s video sharing site in its entirety and was also available for download,” he continues.  “This contrasts with YouTube, which restricts most videos on the site to be under 10 minutes in length.”

Now companies attached to “Sicko” seem even less happy, and the National Legal and Policy Center is starting to take note.  This “independent watchdog organization . . . has begun to probe copyright violations on Google’s video sites and workers there have found more than 125 full-length movies and TV shows at Google Video,” reports Sandoval.

“Sicko” seems to be off Google Video at this point, but the damage could be done (think another lawsuit or two).  Google might want to put a few more people on the team developing its video fingerprinting tools, and, as long as changes are being made, open the lines of communication between YouTube and Google Video.