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I find it incredible that if I search for [spacex] on YouTube during a launch, the official livestream doesn't appear in the first 20 results. Instead, it's al

by dpifke 5y ago

I find it incredible that if I search for [spacex] on YouTube during a launch, the official livestream doesn't appear in the first 20 results. Instead, it's all scams like what you described. I wonder at what point Google's competence at search dropped to the point that they can't return the channel named "SpaceX" in response to my query.

Guest19023892 5y ago
During the Pixel 6 event last month I searched on YouTube for the live stream that would be starting in a few minutes and clicked the first result. The result had a Pixel 6 thumbnail, the live icon, Google in the channel name, the Google logo as the avatar, and around 30k viewers. I was a bit surprised someone was already talking on the stage and thought I tuned in late. Well, after watching for 5 or 10 minutes, they kept talking about Pixel 5s, and then I realized it was a fake account streaming the event from the previous year. I went back to YouTube search and tried a variety of queries for fun, such as "pixel 6 event", "pixel live", "pixel 6 stream", "pixel phone", and they all featured this fake stream as the first result. It continued to grow and was over 50k viewers. Further down the list was another stream with the same thumbnail, same avatar, and a similar channel name, and that happened to be the real one. It had around 120k viewers, so not much better than the fake channel. After about 30 minutes or half way through the event, the fake stream was finally removed from the results.
Const-me 5y ago
I think their competence is fine, and the service works exactly as designed. The main problem is, Google is both publisher, search indexer, and advertisement network. Worse, it’s a near monopoly on all 3 of these markets. When you search for SpaceX, Google has a choice. They can optimize for search quality by taking you to their official channel which has no ads. Doing that only causes them expenses. Bandwidth and compute are very cheap at their scale, but not free. Or they can take you to these heavily monetized third-parties with the same content. Because these copy-cats are monetized through the same google, google is taking a non-trivial cut from every advertisement dollar spent while people watching these videos.

by dpifke 5y ago

Guest19023892 5y ago

During the Pixel 6 event last month I searched on YouTube for the live stream that would be starting in a few minutes and clicked the first result. The result had a Pixel 6 thumbnail, the live icon, Google in the channel name, the Google logo as the avatar, and around 30k viewers. I was a bit surprised someone was already talking on the stage and thought I tuned in late. Well, after watching for 5 or 10 minutes, they kept talking about Pixel 5s, and then I realized it was a fake account streaming the event from the previous year. I went back to YouTube search and tried a variety of queries for fun, such as "pixel 6 event", "pixel live", "pixel 6 stream", "pixel phone", and they all featured this fake stream as the first result. It continued to grow and was over 50k viewers. Further down the list was another stream with the same thumbnail, same avatar, and a similar channel name, and that happened to be the real one. It had around 120k viewers, so not much better than the fake channel. After about 30 minutes or half way through the event, the fake stream was finally removed from the results.

Const-me 5y ago

I think their competence is fine, and the service works exactly as designed. The main problem is, Google is both publisher, search indexer, and advertisement network. Worse, it’s a near monopoly on all 3 of these markets. When you search for SpaceX, Google has a choice. They can optimize for search quality by taking you to their official channel which has no ads. Doing that only causes them expenses. Bandwidth and compute are very cheap at their scale, but not free. Or they can take you to these heavily monetized third-parties with the same content. Because these copy-cats are monetized through the same google, google is taking a non-trivial cut from every advertisement dollar spent while people watching these videos.