Update: YouTube has officially announced the feature:
Today, Comments Search moves into Test Tube, the place where our engineers and developers test out new features and gather data and feedback before pushing them out to a wider audience. This feature allows you to search the comments people are making on YouTube in real time. The full comment will appear on a continuously updated results page, and “trending topics” indicates the hottest topics of conversation on YouTube at that particular moment. Comments Search is a way you can find out what YouTube users are saying about everything from the news stories of the day (below, see results when we typed in “balloon boy”) to your individual channel or brand.
Original Article: Add one more thing to your list of online reputation management tools. YouTube has real-time search for the site’s comments. Considering that YouTube is by far the largest online video site in the world, and is even considered to be the second largest search engine, YouTube comments are probably not something that brands want to ignore.
Now that you are able to easily search for the latest comments for whatever keyword you choose, monitoring what people are saying about you on YouTube should be quite a bit easier. Although, it could be easier still.
“Unfortunately, there are no feeds being published to syndicate these search results into a reader off-site,” notes Marshall Kirkpatrrick of ReadWriteWb, who stumbled across this addition to YouTube. “The regular search on YouTube now has RSS feeds and Google Wonder Wheel data being published, so perhaps comment search will have feeds added soon as well.”
“YouTube comments are notoriously not worth reading, but now you can search their full text…in real time,” says Kirkpatrick. “There are some very real, potential use-cases crying out for a tool like this.”
It is unclear just how long this feature is actually been available, but if it’s been out a while, it doesn’t seem to have been acknowledged much until now. The feature can be used at youtube.com/comment_search.
If you are looking to be found in real-time searches, commenting on YouTube videos may provide for another good way to go about doing so. That doesn’t mean spam. It means that if you engage in more relevant conversation throughout the YouTube community, people will be more likely to see your comments in searches. I suppose the real question is how often will people other than those monitoring their reputations actually be looking for information from YouTube comments.
