Google Thinks YouTube Is All About Paris Hilton

You know how for some sites Google will surface internal pages and subdirectories directly within its search results? I don’t know that there’s an official term for these, but Google’s search rankings guru Matt Cutts described them as “useful links from within a site” in a 2005 blog post, explaining that they were entirely algorithmic. This isn’t done for every result, but often the top one. “The algorithms pick the sites where this could be helpful,” according to Cutts. “Of course money isn’t involved at all.”

But sometimes the links are just silly. Apparently the top useful subdirectory on YouTube is “Paris in Jail,” the music video parody with 22.5 million views. Other choices are a bit more expected — “categories,” “history,” “channels,” but there’s also a documentary about education, a funny R&B music video spoof, and the best option ever, the official YouTube April Fool’s Day Rickroll. Here’s a screenshot from Friday:

OK, OK, you say it’s not algorithmic. But this is for a site Google knows really, really well!

Other video sites, like Yahoo, have much less exciting links featured.

And then others, like Veoh, don’t even get the special snippets feature.

Here are some more video aggregator examples. Break.com, of course, features a bowel movement reaction video, whereas three of Metacafe’s six links are related to adult content: