YouTube Search Function

/**
 * This method searches YouTube and potentially eventually other video services for a video
 * clip featuring the passed in subject.  Then it returns the HTML for an embeddable player
 * to play that video.
 *
 * @param string
 *
 * @return string
 */
public function embeddableVideoClipFor($searchString)
{
    // Previous experience revealed that video search is not perfect, in that for given
        // keywords the top result isn't always accurate.
    $embeddableVideoClipHTML = NULL;

    // Further details on searching YouTube http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-youtubeapi/
    // This was working well for over two years but had to be revised to use version 2 of API
    // May switch to Zend or version 3.0 of Google/YouTube API...

    $vq = $searchString;
    $vq = preg_replace('/[[:space:]]+/', ' ', trim($vq));
        $vq = urlencode($vq);
        $feedURL = 'http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q=' . $vq . '&safeSearch=none&orderby=relevance&v=2';

    // read feed into SimpleXML object
    try
    {
        $youTubeXML = simplexml_load_file($feedURL);
    }
    catch(Exception $e)
    {
        // This rarely throws an error, but when it does, I just pretend I can't find a video clip
        $youTubeXML = NULL;
    }

    if(($youTubeXML != NULL) && ( ! empty($youTubeXML->entry->link[0]['href'])))
    {
        $videoLink = $youTubeXML->entry->link[0]['href'];
        // This is not enough, I need to trim the beginning and end off this to just get the video code
        $trimedURL = str_replace('http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=', '' , $videoLink);
        $videoCode = str_replace('&feature=youtube_gdata', '', $trimedURL);
        $embeddableVideoClipHTML = '<iframe id="ytplayer" type="text/html" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/' . $videoCode . '"frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>';
    }

    return $embeddableVideoClipHTML;
}