As previously reported, Google announced its list of February algorithm/search quality changes. The list had forty changes. One of them was “more locally relevant predictions in YouTube’.

The related part of the list says:

More locally relevant predictions in YouTube. [project codename “Suggest”] We’ve improved the ranking for predictions in YouTube to provide more locally relevant queries. For example, for the query [lady gaga in ] performed on the US version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in times square], but for the same search performed on the Indian version of YouTube, we might predict [lady gaga in India].

Clearly better suggestions/predictions for YouTube users is an area of interest Google is very focused on these days.

Another example of evidence to that effect would be a letter the company recently wrote to Congress regarding its new (and widely publicized) privacy policy changes. In the letter, Google noted that the old policies have restricted the company’s ability to combine info within an account for web history (search history for signed in users) and YouTube.

“For example, if a user is signed in and searching Google for cooking recipes, our current privacy policies wouldn’t let us recommend cooking videos when she visits YouTube based on her searches – even though she was signed into the same Google Account when using both Google Search and YouTube,” Google said in the letter.

The privacy policy consolidation, and the merging of Google products into one larger Google product (for all intents and purposes) along with the new location-based recommendation adjustment indicate that Google is trying hard to keep people on YouTube for longer periods of time, which is really just a reflection of other YouTube announcements of late (the redesign being a primary example).

The connected living room is becoming a reality for more and more people, and YouTube is still the big kid on the block for online video. It’s going to be more important than ever for Google to keep users not only coming back, but keeping them on site for as much time as possible.

This other entry to Google’s list may be worth taking into consideration as well:

Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename “Venice”] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.