I may be late to the table with this...maybe really late but I thought it was worth a share. Remember the popular Google "Search Story" television ads? You can now make custom versions of them yourself. Google now has made a new feature for any registered YouTube user to be able to fill in any search terms (seven lines of searches), set the video to music and BAM - you've got yourself a search story.

The search fields allow you to use different types of searches such as web search, image search, maps, blogs products etc. It's up to you to show which type of search works best to tell your story effectively. I believe this is a brilliant marketing move by Google, providing customers with a unique and user friendly experience while their brand is splashed all over every video that's automatically published. People are voluntarily creating Google ads and spreading them virally online. Impressive.

You can take a stab at this at www.youtube.com/searchstories. It's a lot of fun to play around with. I actually made my own "Save the date-ish" type video telling the story of my upcoming nuptials. Also showed this on my Thought Spasms blog.

Have any of you all played around with this?

Related articles

• Weekly Search & Social News: 01/18/2011 (searchenginejournal.com)
• 5 Ways to Get More From Online Video (ducttapemarketing.com)
• Search Within Results Google Results Not Really Gone (seroundtable.com)