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Speaking as someone who has scraped Google properties for a living in the past: your test was not reliable. Google is very good at detecting inhuman traffic, an
by Analemma_ 8y ago
Speaking as someone who has scraped Google properties for a living in the past: your test was not reliable. Google is very good at detecting inhuman traffic, and they frequently silently degrade results rather than throw up a CAPTCHA, to give competitors bad information and not tip them off that their scraping is being detected (which would prompt the scrapers to better conceal themselves)
- manfredo 8y agoI don't think so. It opened an incognito window over VPN. It then watched 50-100% of the video (randomly determined) before clicking a recommendation. I repeated the tests manually and got generally similar patterns of recommendations. I guess I could improve randomization of mouse movements, but I don't think they's much incentive for YouTube to detect automated browsers to control recommendations. Is your line of thinking that they say "hey, if we detect an automated browser we'll recommended a bunch of family friendly videos but when it's real users we'll recommended the creepy stuff?" That's pretty moustache-twirlingly conniving and I don't see a big incentive for YouTube to do this.