YouTube Embeds - Invasion of the Search Boxes

The New America Foundation, like half the sites on the web, makes extensive use of embedded YouTube videos. We long ago made the decision to use YouTube as our de facto video hosting service -- both for the added exposure it offers to New America events, and for the simple reason that the cost of storing and streaming our hundreds of hours of video was more than the organization could afford.*

This evening, though, I hopped over to NewAmerica.net and was greeted with the unpleasant surpise of YouTube search boxes plastered atop every one of our embedded videos. Apparently this "feature" was unveiled last month, but must have been rolled out gradually -- because at 6pm, our homepage looked like this:

and at 11pm it looked like this:

Such is life when you're relying on free web services and third-party APIs, but it's definitely not the look we're looking for. And the effect was even worse on our event pages, where the video search box appeared almost directly below our site search box -- making things confusing as well as clunky.

Luckily, Google is pretty good about making this stuff optional -- it'd be nice if such "improvements" were opt-in rather than opt-out, but it's an easy fix.

All that's required is the addition of &showsearch=0 to the end of the URL in the embed code. So instead of:

...embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/cPWJ-hdz2f8"...

it's

...embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/cPWJ-hdz2f8&showsearch=0"...

There are lots of other tweaks one can make to the look and feel of embedded videos. But if you're suddenly faced with uninvited search boxes, the code change above is a good place to start.

* The economics have actually changed quite a bit since this decision was made in 2006, and we may shift to Flash Video and Amazon's S3 storage as the primary "home" for our embedded videos. And full disclosure: Google CEO Eric Schmidt is also chairman of New America's board of directors -- but that connection had nothing to do with my decision to use YouTube for New America videos (or our potential shift to a different solution).