When using a “how-to” type query, Google showed me not just a YouTube video result, but a suggested clip from the video highlighting the exact time they want you to watch.
This is incredibly cool and weird at the same time.
Is it possible they know that most people that watch the particular video seem to watch or spend the most time on that particular segment?
Have many people linked to or embedded this particular video using the “start at” option thus adding a timestamp parameter to the url?
The display url in the SERPs does not seem to have the start time query parameter to the end of the url, so I wonder how exactly Google is serving this result.
I have been unable to recreate this in many cases using the exact same search.
Anyone know? Let me know below.
Update: September 21, 2017
I am seeing this feature appear more and more, for various “how-to” type searches. I believe this implementation has now potentially become an important part of the algorithm, or perhaps voice recognition has gotten better. Both Facebook and Google are automatically adding transcriptions to videos in many cases, with the new version of YouTube making it even more accessible from the menu on each video page.
This leads me to believe that Google may attempt to serve more and more results from YouTube based on speech recognition.
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