The YouTube masthead refers to the top navigational are on the YouTube homepage – you know, the upper part where you see the search box where you type in a query and the popular video sites chucks video results your way. Now that you know what it is and where to find it, here’s the good news: it has been redesigned. According to the development team at YouTube, the main purpose of this redesign is to make it easier for you to search for content on the site.

“We’ve done a bit of housecleaning. We've streamlined and simplified the design to focus on the primary experience of YouTube: watching a video. The left side is dedicated to exploration: finding videos to watch through search and browse. The right side is all about organization of the videos that matter most to you: your subscriptions, your recent viewing history, and your own uploads,” explained Product Manager with YouTube, Shiva Rajaraman.

When you look at the redesigned YouTube masthead you cannot but notice the similarities between it and the masthead of another site, mainly Google.com. And why now, since the Mountain View-based search engine giant owns YouTube. Here’s what I am talking about. The new YouTube masthead and the masthead displayed on the Google search results page: logo to the left, big and visible search box, the main buttons are simple links (YouTube displays the links under the search box, Google displays them above it).

Moving on, what else has changed? The masthead has been cleaned up – YouTube says this needed to be done in order to make the homepage “as functional as possible. Consequently the homepage will not display the Quicklist and Inbox unless you have items in there; additionally, the language pulldown menus are now in the footer, not at the top of the page.

YouTube announced that more changes are about to come. We have no details on what they are, but they will focus on “giving you the controls to make the masthead more personalized.”