Youtube is supposedly the second largest search engine. It only makes sense that the video site's search capabilities should be expanded. that is just what YouTube has been working on. This week, they have added some new ways to customize your search experience, and hopefully better find the videos you are looking for.

The Wonder Wheel

You may recall that Google introduced its new search options a while back, which gives users of the search engine a lot more control over the results they see for any given search. One of the features in this release was the "wonder wheel," which is basically a visual representation of related searches that you can use to navigate through your search experience.

YouTube has now incorporated this into its results as well. When you perform a search on YouTube, you may see a link on the right side above the results that says "wonder wheel". Clicking it will bring up something that looks like this:

Wonder wheel doesn't appear to be an option for all searches. When I search for "social media" I am not presented with the option, but when I search for "Facebook" as in the above image, I am.

Improved Advanced Search

When you go to search something on YouTube, and you click the "advanced options" link, you will now be presented with more options.

"Let's say you want to narrow down your search for a video and be more precise about what you're looking for," explains the YouTube Team. "Advanced Search allows you to specify many more details than our normal search, including when a video was uploaded, the location it came from, and its length. We've reworked Advanced Search to be easier to use and to better reflect the range of content on YouTube (lots of new stuff!)."

To be honest, I'm not really sure what all features were available here in the past, but now you can find results using queries and specifying to use all words, an exact phrase, one or more words, or none of the words. You can request results based on videos, channels, playlists, shows, movies, or all. You can request results to show only HD, annotations, closed captions, or partner videos.

You can also refine your search by duration, language, upload time (general - anytime, this month, this week, or today), location, and category.

Other recent features added to YouTube include a remaining time display on the upload progress bar, the ability to download MP4 files of your own videos, and YouTube XL, which is designed to give users a more television-like experience. YouTub'e mobile app is also now available in French, UK English, Italian, Spanish, German, and Dutch.

Heaven help Google's competitors if the search giant ever figures out how to consistently make money off individual YouTube videos. According to a new report, a stunning number of clips are streamed worldwide each day: over 1 billion.

That works out to about 41.7 million clips per hour, or 694,000 clips per minute. Or as Michael Arrington, who confirmed the billion-per-day streaming rate with Google, noted, "That pretty much means everyone on the Internet, on average, is watching one YouTube video per day."

Not everything in YouTube's world is sunshine and roses, though. New Compete numbers are out, and it seems that the video-sharing site saw 1.75 percent fewer visitors in May than in April.

Other social media sites, including Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, all experienced month-over-month increases in this respect, which makes the YouTube development something of an anomaly.

Plus, if you stop to remember that YouTube isn't making money off of every video it streams, the billion-per-day rate sounds a lot less impressive.

On the bright side (as far as Google's bank accounts are concerned), there's a gigantic ad for a game called Prototype on the YouTube homepage at the moment.