YouTube and the Conglomeration Thereof

YouTube recently added a search bar to their embedded videos, which used to only show up at the end of each video. Now it also shows up at the beginning by default. And it's ugly.

While it's easy to remove, and I'll get to how in a minute, I wanted to point out that in forcing the search bar for videos placed on external sites, YouTube is actually losing potential viewers.

I've been a big fan of their embedded videos up until this point. YouTube and Google have done wonders to display media content easily on the Web. However, when I'm embedding a video I want the content to be the most important thing and if YouTube wants to tack on other content to the end of it, then I'm more than okay with it.

But I don't want searching for YouTube content to actually have a higher profile than the content I was originally linking.

As soon as I saw the obtrusive search sitting on the top of ALL the linked videos on imbalanced, I immediately began searching for a fix. I like their company and services, but I'm not a shill for them.

Removing the search is actually quite easy, but search should be off by default at least at the beginning of the video. The YouTube API gives you two options: 1)remove the search, or 2)remove ALL related video references.

Wait, I can remove all related videos?

The secret is out. Had the search bar not been added, I would have never ventured into the land of the YouTube API, thereby allowing YouTube to get more add-on hits from my embedded content. Instead, my viewers can stay on imbalanced and be none-the-wiser to a different shirtless fat kid dancing to the Macarana video.

Good job, YouTube. You just lost potential traffic by overachieving.

Okay, now that I'm done ranting, let's get down to business. If you want to remove just the search bar (like I originally did), then you just add ";showsearch=0" to the web address of the video in the embed code.

Now if you're also like me and want to punish YouTube for being asshats, you can also remove all related content from the end of your embedded videos by adding ";rel=0" to the web address of the video in the embed code.

It's all in the API, but who looks at that stuff anyway? Let me do it so you don't have to.

EDIT: YouTube strikes again! Now videos are showing up with the title and video rank overlayed on the embedded video. Want to remove it? Just add ";showinfo=0" to your video address. *sigh*