Google Leads the Blind, Improves Video Search

Google made a few things easier for searchers this week.

First, Google Labs has cooked up a new tool called Google Accessible Search. Accessible Search is designed to make searching easier for visually imparied people by prioritizing relevant results by Web accessibility.

According to the FAQ, Google Accessible Search favors pages that degrade gracefully. That means pages with few images and standardized layouts should work well. So, everybody still using your blog software’s default layout — and all you standardsNazisgurus out there with your CSS divs and W3C validation tools — rejoice!

I pushed Accessible Search to the max by searching for the mother of all unaccessible sites: eWEEK.com. The results are kinda funny. FWIW, Google Watch is fifth. Using regular Google search, it’s 10th. (Results may vary. Searching from San Francisco with regular search returns Google Watch as the third item, no doubt the result of using Google’s different data centers.)

Google also updated Google Video by making it easy to skip to — and thus bookmark — a specific time point within a video. This is really helpful if you want to, say, see Frank Caliendo’s Kramer impression, impression of Robert DeNiro as Frankenstein’s monster or impression of Casey Cassum as the Boy Wonder.

If none of this blows your skirt up, check out this Google Maps and YouTube mashup.