That YouTube “Experiment” Red Banner Was Just A Display Bug
Last night, some users who were conducting searches on YouTube were seeing a red banner at the top of the search results that said they were part of an “experiment.” What the experiment was and what YouTube was testing were unclear. Truth is it seems like there was no experiment, that the banner was a […]
Last night, some users who were conducting searches on YouTube were seeing a red banner at the top of the search results that said they were part of an “experiment.” What the experiment was and what YouTube was testing were unclear. Truth is it seems like there was no experiment, that the banner was a display bug with YouTube’s search interface.
The banner read:
Experiment: There may be confidential content in your search results. Please do not share outside Google.
This looks like what Google employees would see, as a reminder for them to not take screen shots and post them on Google+ or other social networks. It seems, if I had to guess, that Google accidentally showed this reminder to non-Google employees.
Google’s YouTube account tweeted last night:
Seeing a weird banner in your search results? No worries – fix in the works. Nothing juicy to see here!
The image above was provided by @Stu_Draper, and as you can see, there doesn’t seem to be anything experimental about the interface or search results.
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About the author
In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.
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