Google owned Youtube has had a crafty makeover and the site has revealed a new homepage. The site appears to have taken on some of the appearance of its big brother Google, with a sleeker less cluttered design and the main buttons becoming simple links. And a bigger search box.

Google blogged about the changes:-

“You may notice something looks a little different about our masthead (top navigational area on the homepage) today, and that’s because we’ve done a bit of housecleaning. We’ve streamlined and simplified the design to focus on the primary experience of YouTube: watching a video. 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.

A few features have been removed from this area, to keep it as clean and functional as possible. Your Quicklist, all the videos you tagged to watch later, can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/my_quicklist, and the country and language pulldown menus, once at the very top of the page, are now in the footer.”

The left side is now geared towards finding new videos with the Videos, Channels and Shows sections bundled together along with the new search box. On the right are the more user-centric sections like their own uploaded videos, their history and subscriptions. Some less popular buttons were removed from the masthead, like the country selection, the inbox and quicklist.

The biggest change seems to be the new search box, which now takes up a larger part of the screen, before it was situated in a central position and was significantly smaller. Whilst this may not seem that important it is a very significant for Google as it is a search engine and makes the user want to start searching and therefore changes the way they discover new videos. YouTube is already the number two search engine in the US on its own, with 3.6 billion queries in June, overtaking Yahoo, with 2.9 billion.

The results page also looks very Googly but with videos next to each site.

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