YouTube's search function is atrocious now [video](youtube.com) |
YouTube's search function is atrocious now [video](youtube.com) |
Eg, "before:2012 python talk"
As an experiment open two tabs and compare the results of "python talk" and "before:2012 python talk". The difference is staggering.
I bet there are already tickets in google-JIRA to break this functionality :(
I responded by logging out, deleting the cookies for my YouTube container, and adding the YouTube domain to my adblock. My use of YouTube is now restricted to RSS feeds for channels I like, redirected to an Invidious or Piped instance. Highly recommended.
It really does need attention urgently because it's turning people into nervous wrecks, and they don't seem able to stop themselves.
I’ve had this one suggested to me multiple times as well for completely unrelated content. It’s not the kind of thing that I watch or would click on even out of curiosity, but YouTube really thinks I should watch it for some reason.
I've had problems with youtube search recently, but because I use google more often it's so much more obvious with google search.
Like I hate how they have that bar that keeps changing different search modes, before 'images', 'videos' used to be in a fixed position, now I have to go searching for it in a soup of unrelated words like 'Finance', 'Flights', etc.
YouTube doesn't really care if the search function gives you the right or wrong search result. Totally irrelevant as long as you click something, anything and your eyeballs are on the next ad. YouTube is optimised for keeping you watching ... literally anything... as long as they can play you some ads, preferably expensive ads.
And trying to increase its usability and profitability outside of ads would affect negatively Google's overall business.
In my experience the UX for google products has been an absolute dumpster fire for many years. I switched to DDG half a decade ago because I literally kept tapping/clicking on the wrong things constantly in the Google search interface. In other words it was so bad that I decided to switch even before the latest drop in the quality of search results, purely because of the UX.
For instance, searching for the double-quoted string "bears don't like it when you solve" verbatim gives zero results, but that's exactly the transcript for 8:14 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1G9vIyNL20&t=491s
Particularly frustrating when I remember a random snippet or phrase from a video but not the _title_
And it's not like you need fancy AI to do it. Just a handful of simple heuristics.
C# ;)
Free labour is how I was downloading YT videos to my unsupported Windows Phone device in 2011.
This presumes you're doing the trillion dollar company a favor, but an independent index isn't likely to align with YT's engagement goals.
You could run classifiers against the video but $$$
For those not watching the video, he's searching for "games that think more gameplay mechanics equals more fun" (not in quotes) which you can see the results of:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=games+that+thin...
He expects it to list his video with that title:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZKcZbi1rg
But that video... just isn't in the search results at all. I thought -- maybe it's an obscure video? Maybe the others are just way more popular? But no -- his video has 15 million views. While the search results have some homage or re-uploads with 575K, 1.4K, 739 views... so the fact that it's missing his original video means it's just broken. Yikes.
Note that it does finds the video as the #1 result if you search only within his channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@ProZD/search?query=games%20that%20t...
But the point is, this isn't some kind of "product decision" affecting the ranking. This isn't about prioritizing money over niche content or something.
This is just an instance where YouTube search is just flat-out broken. There's a serious bug here -- the questions are, how widespread is it, and why isn't Google finding it and patching it before we figure it out? It seems like a serious problem with quality control.
It might have been Christchurch mosque shooting videos.
For others, Unhook lets you hide elements of the YouTube experience, and even replace your home page with just your subscriptions.
Youtube/Google have simply become insane. You're at work, looking for some Youtube coding tutorial, and you get some video with a sexual thumbnail, or something about a disgusting ear disease or something. What the hell Google? Shouldn't these video be marked as sexual/NSFW content at first place?
Deleting youtube view history and turning it off used to fix these things, but not anymore, it doesn't make any difference. I've never seen that, a mainstream, non tabloid, website that forces its user to see sexualized or disgusting content.
Youtube employees here, do you really believe it makes people more likely to watch youtube videos? It doesnt.
I don't want to see "other viewers have also watched these", I don't want to see "for you". I only want to see what is relevant to the query I just made.
Isn't it ironic? Google beat Altavista back in the days because Google search results were more accurate than the competition. But now that Google is basically a monopoly in search, it simply decided to forego its core value for profit and display the user garbage results, results Google think the user might be interested in regardless of the search query, and not results the user explicitly searched for. This isn't a search engine anymore, this is a recommendation engine...
Though it's very possible I'm just missing the sarcasm here.
Both Amazon search and trying to workaround it's problems by using it's "categories" are frustrating experiences.
It also extra annoying that sometimes you do get, and other times you don't get a link to category specific product you're looking at belongs.
And as soon as you sort/filter reaults it goes from bad to even worse.
Amusingly if you turn off the watch history then the frontpage passive aggressively refuses to show you anything, rather than falling back to showing your subscriptions, which you still have to click through to a separate page to see.
Who wants the “Related articles” after the first paragraph in every single news article? Who wants the endless garbage links below the “Click to expand” button? Who wants to scroll past “Top picks in your neighbourhood”, “Offers near you”, “New on Deliveroo”, “Most favourited places”, “Meal deals”, “Top rated” and “Fastest delivery” (yes, ALL 7 of them) before you even get to the actual search results on Deliveroo? I really don’t know. And it terrifies me that I don’t know.
Bandwidth isn't cheap, storage is a bucket load and than moderation & copyright. Let alone any other issues.
This isn’t going to get better on behalf of YT product teams, and Sora et al are going to ratchet up the stakes
Needless to say ten minutes of absentmindedly scrolling ruins your suggested results for a long time
I use my own RSS reader for YouTube. Then I search RSS feeds for anything useful.
e.g. Y-search used to honor the operators like 'intitle:' and `|` like G-search, but that functionality is long gone. I'm not even convinced '-' works anymore.
Nothing's gonna save their query system except Google's backend engineers. Good luck waiting for that.
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Until then I highly recommend using userscripts/addons to bring some sanity back to using the platform:
'Block Youtube Users' : "hides videos of users/channels from home, search, related, and comments"
https://greasyfork.org/scripts/11057-block-youtube-users
~~ My favorite! It's like GHHbD[0] but from within Youtube.
[0] http://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/
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'YouTube: Hide Watched Videos' by EvHaus : 'mask or hide visibility of watched videos and shorts'
https://github.com/EvHaus/youtube-hide-watched
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'Return WATCHED badge on Youtube (with custom text)' by q1k : "Brings back the WATCHED overlay to the videos you have already watched"
https://greasyfork.org/scripts/419722-return-watched-badge-o...
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'YouTube Clickbait-Buster' by hjk789 : "Check whether it's worth watching a video before actually clicking on it, by 'peeking' its visual or verbal content, description, comments, viewing the thumbnail in full-size and displaying the full title"
https://github.com/hjk789/Userscripts/tree/master/YouTube-Cl...
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'Youtube Scrollable Right Side Description' by sh3ll : "Description is moved on the right, expanded and scrollable (and a view-count is put under the player)" {FYI: if you use a white or light theme on YT, go into the script and change the view-count text to something dark}
https://greasyfork.org/scripts/452405-youtube-scrollable-rig...
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'Make "Videos" the default tab on Youtube channels', a contrib by Scriptchansky
https://greasyfork.org/en/discussions/requests/56798#comment...
It also doesn't do that second load when I f5/enter the url directly.
A few moments ago I searched for "Porter Robinson Ludwig" to continue watching a 2 hour stream where Porter Robinson guides Ludwig through making a beat. The 6th result in my search list is a video I've watched before, "Pro Players Play 50€ decks" from a Magic The Gathering channel. Nothing to do with Porter Robinson or Ludwig or music. It's just there's because I've watched it once before.
If I type in the search query of "games that think more gameplay mechanics equals more fun" after just a few videos, the videos in search switch to being completely unrelated and are labeled either "You might also like this", or "Previously Watched". Hilariously, "Porter Robinson (Teaches Ludwig How to Produce Music)" is video is #6. #7 is "Streamer Fakes Blindfold Speedrun for Clout". The video by ProZD with that exact title does not appear in the first 30 results, and that's when I quit counting.
Good grief the people in charge of YouTube and Google have put their products in complete free fall because that’s the only way they can see a non-zero velocity.
Information that goes on the internet never truly goes away, be it through personal archive sites or more general ones like archive.org (which archives youtube.com directly), it just becomes harder to find unless specifically sought for.
The knowledge that I'm most certainly missing something when doing dated searches, and I'm viewing results filtered by people's current-day hindsight, instead of the unfiltered essence of the youtube of yesteryear makes me sad. We lost a lot of authenticity in the pursuit of flawless public images.
If you want Despacito and the Baby Shark Dance to be your top videos, it gets a lot harder.