YouTube's head engineer reveals his 'wildest dreams' for the site
YouTubeCristos Goodrow Every minute, people around the world upload more than 300 hours of video to YouTube. Every minute.
The site has billions of videos - a wide range of content that includes surprised kittens, pop song parodies, and slam poetry, but also longer shows about cooking, video games, and crash courses in subjects you didn't learn in school.
"We believe that for every human being on earth, there's 100 hours of Youtube that they would love to watch," YouTube's engineering director, Cristos Goodrow, told Business Insider. "So, we start with that premise and then it's our job to help viewers to find the videos that they would enjoy watching."
The secret sauce is a recommendation system that tries to figure out what any given person might love. YouTube wants any user to be able to visit the site's homepage and instantly discover a bunch of videos that spark their interest.
A wide range of signals influence YouTube's recommendation algorithm, including video watch time, which YouTube decided to prioritize over view count back in 2012. The site will make the obvious recommendations - like by subject or by creator - but it also uses its vast quantities of data to find correlations between topics. For example, Goodrow explains, the data could indicate that people who watch tennis videos often spend time on race car videos, too, so YouTube might prod users to try one or the other out.
Right now, a user has to search for their first video before the recommendation engine takes over, but Goodrow hopes that one day that won't be the case.
He uses an example from his own life to explain:
One day he was listening to a Dan Carlin Hardcore History podcast about World War One. Finding himself competely engrossed in the topic, he decided to do a quick search on YouTube. Unexpectedly, he found that the site is flush with content about WWI, from old footage to documentaries. His YouTube homepage recommended a bunch of different channels that pertained to this interest accordingly.
Cristos envisions a day when your YouTube account is much more connected with the rest of your digital life, so that you don't have to complete a single search to find what you might want to watch.
"In my wildest dreams, we would imagine that I could come to Youtube and before I do a search, it would know that I was listening to the Dan Carlin Hardcore History podcast, and the WWI stuff would just be there," he says. "We're not quite there yet. We're still relying on a lot of input from the viewer and more work from the viewer. But that would be the best case."
This focus on finding new ways to use contextual data and information has become a priority for all of Google. Earlier this summer, the company announced Google Now On Tap, which instantly serves up additional information about basically anything on your smartphone's screen.
Because Google makes you connect all of your accounts with a single log-in ID, it doesn't seem to far-fetched for Google to be able to sync your podcast preferences with your YouTube recommendations.