Feross Aboukhadijeh
| Developer(s) | Feross Aboukhadijeh |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 10 September 2010 |
| Written in | JavaScript, jQuery |
| Available in | English |
| Website | www |
YouTube Instant is a real-time search engine built and launched in September 2010 by nineteen-year-old college student and Facebook-software-engineer intern Feross Aboukhadijeh of Stanford University that allows its users to search the YouTube video database as they type. It follows on the heels of Google Instant, and has been described as a "novelty toy", a "prototypal digit to tie the “instant” bandwagon" as well as a "completely excellent way to waste 15 minutes".
Aboukhadijeh was offered a job from YouTube CEO Chad Hurley shortly after he created the site. At the point of YouTube Instant's creation, Aboukhadijeh was a summer intern at Facebook, and has said that he is working on a secret Facebook project.
The launch of YouTube Instant was announced by Aboukhadijeh on Y Combinator’s Hacker News feed. It is modelled after Google Instant — as a user types in the video they are looking for, "the engine guesses the video and begins playing it immediately."
The project started off as a bet with his college roommate. Aboukhadijeh was quoted as saying, "It started out as a bet with my roommate, Jake Becker. I bet him I could build real-time YouTube search in less than an hour." Aboukhadijeh lost the bet, for it took him three hours to complete the site, and another couple hours to polish it. Aboukhadijeh said he found it "surprisingly easy to build".
Aboukhadijeh built the site by using the YouTube API. He scraped YouTube search suggestions because Google blocked his server for making far too many repeated requests to the search suggestion endpoint. Aboukhadijeh had to re-write the site to instead query YouTube directly for search suggestions, "eliminating the round-trip to [his] server", in order to address the problem.
The YouTube Instant interface, which looks similar to the YouTube front page consists of a box designed for a user to type in his search letter or phrase. As each letter of the search phrase is typed in, the server goes out into "YouTube video land" and tries to find matches for the search term similarly to current Google Instant search.
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