To start off with I'm not entirely sure if this is the most appropriate part of the forum to post this in, so please feel free to move this Wirla if such is the case. Moving on from that I'd like to explain what Google Video once was.
On the day of January 25 2005, less than a month before YouTube itself launched, Google released its own platform allowing users to upload videos onto a site structured similarly to how YouTube itself initially appeared. At the time of its initial release many of its uploads were similar to what YouTube's would be as well, but I primarily liked to watch the various speedrun videos of that period, NAVGTR and drp1zza's WWF No Mercy CAW story series during a time before he went further bonkers. At this point I was 10 years old and had no clue of what was to come from the next two years being active on both sites. I have fond memories of this period as I became an annoying part of one of my first online communities revolving around what's basically a lost machinima (not related to the company named such, but the film production method) series known as Stupid Mario, but I'll discuss that another time.
About a year and a half after YouTube came onto the video sharing scene, on October 9 2006, Google had purchased YouTube from the original group of founders for $1.65 billion, and 9 months afterward on June 13, 2007, it was announced that Google Video would begin showcasing videos from other services such as YouTube itself, which would lay the foundation for Google Video as we currently know it today. Knowing that Google generally likes to make excuses to kill off its own services if anything better is typically acquired, starting some time in 2009 users were no longer able to upload more videos to the service although they would still be hosted through the video search engine that Google Video had eventually become. Other features were also eventually retired, but nothing would be as big as what was to be announced after all of that. On April 15th, 2011, Google suddenly announced through a mass-email to its user base that they would be removing all videos that were uploaded exclusively for Google Video when it operated partly as a video sharing service, which was likely done to make more room for the other online video platforms that had exceeded any notable user activity Google Video had in its early stages of relevancy. However, this move would prove to make many upset that feared it wouldn't be nearly enough time for them to download what they had uploaded. Archivists as a result rushed to crawl through the service and download as much as they possibly could for preservation purposes which the effort had ended up downloading around 40% of the entirety of Google Video as a whole. Google in response decided to hold off shutting down the service and instead made a promise to its users that they could migrate their videos to YouTube if they so wished. The primary archival team that had even set up a "warroom" over such decided the announcement constituted as a victory and so archival of Google Video had began slowing exceptionally. The Internet Archive itself offered to host video data which is still available on their site but is currently unplayable as of 2017. One year after they promised not to shut down Google Video, on August 20, 2012, they had suddenly decided to do so anyway, seemingly without any warning whatsoever, leading to what may now be hidden gems that could never see the light of day which I assume was simply all because Google wanted to further promote YouTube as a whole, not even appearing to have attempted to find a way to integrate the entirety of user uploads exclusively on Google Video into such. In contrast to the initial perceived "total victory" as the Archive Team Wiki would put it, I call this a devastating loss. As of 2021, the domain still exists in the form of a simple video search engine.
Proceeding on a more optimistic note, I've also started this topic to share an idea that perhaps we could somehow scour and view the video data that is contained within Archive.org's Google Video page to potentially find videos such as content relating to Worlds or Traveler that may be unavailable anywhere else besides being uploaded exclusively within the video sharing service. As I have no idea how to begin to go from there I was hoping that perhaps more experienced users on this forum heavily interested in archival efforts would be curious about finding out how to begin viewing said video data themselves. If anyone already knows how to do so I would love to know how to begin doing so myself!
List of links used as research for this topic:
Wikipedia's article on Google VideoArchive Team Wiki's Google Video articleArchive Team Wiki's "Google Video Warroom"Internet Archive's Google Video crawldata collection