So what do you do if you're a giant search company that happens to own two separate and kind of competing video sharing services? If you guessed this isn't really a hypothetical question you're smarter than you look.

So Google goes and buys YouTube for a ridiculous amount of money, and then has to figure out what to with the much less popular Google Video. Today, we have our answer: turn it into the video version of Google's image search.

When you search for videos using Google now, you get results hosted by Google, but also videos on sites including Yahoo!, Metacafe, and of course YouTube. At the top of the page, you'll see a list of related videos and an option to see the next or previous video in your search results.

As for the result itself, you're taken to the site hosting the video -- except you still have the Google interface at the top of your screen. This is similar to the way Google handles image search. For the user, this is either a convenience (find more videos using your favorite search engine) or a huge problem (lose screen real estate while trying to watch videos). But at least Google finally found something to do with its video service.

[via Google Operating System]