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According to a startling statistic recently published by ComScore, YouTube.com would be responsible for 25.4 percent of the overall search queries served by the search engine giant, compared to 17.4 percent in November 2007.

Just a few days earlier, ComScore reported that online videos were viewed an impressive 13.5 billion times in October, a 45 percent increase compared to last year, with Google-owned websites leading the market with an almost 40 percent share, followed at great distance by Fox Interactive Media and Yahoo! sites at 3.8 and 2.7 of market share respectively.

Google’s dominance in the field isn’t a surprise, but the fact that videos account for as much as a quarter of the overall Google queries means that, as ComScore pointed out, if YouTube.com were to be ranked separetely, it would become the second largest search engine on the Internet, second only to Google itself.

Analysts at Google might have taken this into consideration when they offered $1.65 bln to acquire the company in October 2006, a sum that sounded exaggerated for a company that was (and still is) consistently generating a loss that Google itself estimates at around $1 mln a day.

The search giant has tried many avenues to monetize the site properly since its acquisition, but to no avail. Sponsored and featured videos can be published on the site homepage for a daily fee that can reach $225K, leaving AdSense as the only alternative for the vast majority of advertisers.

In more recent times, Google announced it would monetize its video content with Amazon and iTunes affiliate links next to its music videos, but the initiative seems to be still limited to a very small number of videos.

Since the beginning of the current economic downturn, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that the company is going to be more careful with similar acquisitions of unprofitable companies, and that finding a road to profitability for the site would be “our highest priority this year”.

Given the rate at which demand for online video is growing — +45 percent according to ComScore — it’s easy to understand the reason for Schmidt’s previous statement: with the company forced to slow down new hirings and cut on expenses, the economic situation for the company is going to get worse unless a valid solution is found, as bandwidth and maintainance costs for the site are going to grow at a very quick pace.

But Google doesn’t seem to want to cut on service quality to limit the costs: on the contrary, yesterday the YouTube team announced it now supports HD videos, ideal for fullscreen viewing but, needless to say, much more bandwidth-intensive — and therefore expensive — for the company. Part of the latest update are also the three new landing pages “news”, “music” and “movies”: “The news page will be populated with [...] news drawn from the Google News service; music will feature rising videos [...]; movies will showcase some of the most popular short and full-length movies on YouTube today,” it is said in the blog post mentioned above.

Google has instead recently tried to cut its running costs by stipulating private agreements with ISPs and providing them with edge caching servers, a maneuver that raised questions on the company Net Neutrality standards and forced Google to reply directly to such accusations.

Meanwhile, ComScore reported that US users performed 2.73 bln YouTube searches in November, twice as many as last year, putting Google at 63.5 percent of last month’s US searches, up 0.4 percent from October and with a 5.9 percent gain from last year, while both Yahoo! (20.4 percent) and Microsoft (8.3 percent) keep slowly but constantly receding.