WebProNews

YouTube has been touted by its employees as the "2nd largest search engine." With that, it makes sense that the site would place its search feature a little more in the spotlight.

YouTube has tweaked its masthead to eliminate some clutter and do some "housecleaning," as Product Manager Shiva Rajaraman puts it.

"We've streamlined and simplified the design to focus on the primary experience of YouTube: watching a video," says Rajaraman. "The left side is dedicated to exploration: finding videos to watch through search and browse. The right side is all about organization of the videos that matter most to you: your subscriptions, your recent viewing history, and your own uploads."

With the search feature given a bit more prominence, it may start to give YouTube a little bit more of a search engine feel, and inspire more searches. With YouTube starting its AdSense-esque advertising program, it's not hard to understand why they might do this.

If you don't have items in your Quicklist or Inbox, they will not appear on the homepage. The country and language pull-down menus are also gone from the masthead, and have been placed in the footer.

YouTube is also working on making the masthead more personalized, giving users more control. We'll have to wait and see to find out what this means exactly.