YouTube - What Is That Ugly Search Bar Doing In The Videos?

YouTube has silently just “updated” the embedded videos with a very ugly search bar. It’s there until you click play and will reappear for a few seconds every your cursor is near the top of the video.

If you pause a video it will also reappear.

I know I know, this will help YouTube (Google) get even more user data and probably help them target ads even more.

To me it looks more like a piece of malware has infected my PC/Mac and added this terrible search bar to my videos.

YouTube please remove it or I’ll find another service to host my videos. (Yes, that quite a threat I know). Viddler, Vimeo, Blip and a few more are very interested in my many videos and they will give me a free T-shirt if I let them host my videos.

What do you think? Do you like the search bar or is it annoying?

Update: You can remove the search bar by adding this “&showsearch=0? to the URL. Google Code has released this information concerning the search bar.