Are your YouTube embeds showing up with an ugly search box above the video? I had to approve a comment this morning and noticed this monstrosity in one of my posts.

Why would YouTube do this? Well, Google’s been scrambling to introduce new revenue streams since their earnings started getting leaner.

Google stock price YTD

The idea is no doubt that they can use embedded videos to drive more search traffic to YouTube. More traffic, especially search traffic means more ad revenue.

Anyway, how do you disable this feature so you don’t lose visitors to your embedded videos? It’s very simple.

If your embed code looks like this:

<object width="425" height="355"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/u1zgFlCw8Aw&rel=1&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&border=1&fs=1"></param> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/u1zgFlCw8Aw&rel=1&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&border=1&fs=1"type="application/x-shockwave-flash"width="425" height="355" allowfullscreen="true"></embed> </object>

Add this to both the “param” and “embed” sections:

&showsearch=0

So it looks like this:

<object width="425" height="355"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/u1zgFlCw8Aw&rel=1&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&border=1&fs=1&**showsearch=0**"></param> <param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/u1zgFlCw8Aw&rel=1&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&border=1&fs=1**&showsearch=0**"type="application/x-shockwave-flash"width="425" height="355" allowfullscreen="true"></embed> </object>

You can find all the YouTube embeddable player parameters here.

Wish they’d disable it by default.