You have a lot of options when it comes to watching videos on your devices. Most users seem to use YouTube more or less exclusively for all their family friendly video needs, but sites like Vimeo or Dailymotion are popular as well.
Search on YouTube, with YouTube being a Google property, should be one of the strong features of the video streaming site, but it is not really.
While it works, and even lets you filter by upload date and some additional features, it is nowhere near where it could be. It has no preview feature for instance, and while you can add it using extensions, something like it should be built-in in my opinion.
I run all my video searches on Bing Video Search instead, and have two core reasons for that which I would like to explain in detail in the coming paragraphs.
Note: I understand that the comparison between a single-site search engine (YouTube), and a multi-site search engine is not entirely fair. Google's own Video Search seems to focus heavily on YouTube as well however.
Bing Video Search
Bing Video Search is a feature of Microsoft's search engine Bing. While I don't use Bing at all for Web searches, as I find the search engine lacking in that regard -- especially for non-English queries -- I find some of Bing's other features quite useful and often superior to Google's offerings.
You can use the following URL as your entry point to run video searches on Bing: https://www.bing.com/videos/
Simply enter the term you are interested in, and wait for Bing to return results to you. Results are listed with thumbnails, the source site they are hosted on, and information on views, play time, uploader, upload date and title.
While most videos may be hosted on YouTube, you may get results from other sites such as Vimeo, Youku, VM, and lots of other video hosting sites as well. This depends largely on your query. This is the first advantage that Bing Video Search offers over YouTube's or Google Video's own search function.
Sites like Vimeo host exclusive content for instance sometimes. A search on YouTube won't find those videos, while a search on Bing will.
The second feature that makes Bing Video Search superior in my opinion is its preview feature. You can hover over any video on Bing Video Search to get a preview of the video. This preview includes sound, and is a great way to quickly determine a video's quality, and whether it matches what you are looking for.
These two features are not the only ones that Bing offers. Here is a short list of other features that you may find interesting:
- Better filters: You can sort by date, length or resolution, or filter by a specific source.
- If you turn off SafeSearch, you will get NSFW results.
- Save videos to your Microsoft Account, and get personalized feeds based on your savings and activity.
Closing Words
Bing Video Search is a handy multi-site search engine for videos that returns both family friendly and NSFW results based on SafeSearch settings. Its preview feature is the feature that I like the most, as it does away with the "opening video > realizing it is not what I was looking for > going back" workflow on YouTube.
Now You: Which video search engine do you use, and why?
