Is the Google Video PlusBox Fair?
There's an interesting imbalance being created by Google's recent integration of videos right into their search results in the form of a PlusBox. For instance, when I search for finger flip flop video, a Google Blogoscoped blog entry containing …
Context & Ripple Effects
The complaint lands a week after Search Engine Land flagged video blending and video meta search as an emerging pattern, and two months after observers noticed Google surfacing popular blogosphere videos directly in results. The PlusBox is that behavior formalized: a query like "finger flip flop video" expands inline to show a video from a matching blog entry, giving that result more pixels than its ranking alone would earn.
It matters because it revives an old question about Google's neutrality — the same tension behind the January 2006 Video Marketplace launch — now aimed not at a separate product but at the core results page, where Google both ranks the listings and decides which ones get to expand.
First-order effects
- Publishers whose content appears in a PlusBox gain expanded screen real estate and clicks their ranking position wouldn't normally deliver, while competing results on the same page are pushed down.
Second-order effects
- Site owners and SEOs are pushed to chase PlusBox inclusion as a ranking-adjacent advantage, and vertical search players face pressure to get their video metadata into Google's index or be invisible at the moment of the query.
Third-order effects
- If blending becomes standard, the results page shifts from a ranked list of equal links to a layout the engine curates — making Google's inclusion criteria, rather than pure relevance ordering, the de facto gatekeeper for video traffic, a structural conflict-of-interest critique likely to recur whenever the engine features its own or favored formats.
The trend: Search is moving from uniform blue links toward blended, engine-curated results pages where the operator decides which formats and sources get premium placement.