8 ms·
>Some might say that you can still use search At some point Youtube search was neutered. I get 5-10 results for any given query before Youtube gives up and jus
by everdrive 4y ago
>Some might say that you can still use search
At some point Youtube search was neutered. I get 5-10 results for any given query before Youtube gives up and just offers me recommendations rather than search results. Interestingly, if I search google for [search term] site:youtube.com, I actually get pages of results which are never present in the Youtube search. Sadly, it seems that Google has intentionally diminished Youtube's own search function in order to prioritize use of the recommendation system.
- wussboy 4y agoYup. Search reveals two or three relevant videos but from that point on the search results are indistinguishable from the regular feed. And I get the same video recommended to me all the time. Sometimes back to back!
- laweijfmvo 4y agoIf you’re not watching ads, you’re worthless to Youtube. Scrolling through search results wouldn’t increase revenue.
- astrange 4y agoYouTube doesn't show you ads if you buy Premium.
- gammarator 4y agoYou need the YouTube Pro Max+ Platinum bundle to get functional search.
- astrange 4y agoYeah, search doesn't work at all. It does seem like it pulls up specific channels if you put "ch" in the search text, so I tend to go from there.
- Waterluvian 4y agoI feel like I also learned the other day that Google’s search is bad like this too. That it’ll say there’s millions of results and just stop after like 400.
- dredmorbius 4y agoHN's search through Algolia is similar. An unqualified search reports (at this writing) just north of 30 million results (30,000,229). It will display only 34 pages' worth of results, I believe 1,000. See: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...> Final page: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=33&prefix=false&query=&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=33&prefix=false&q...> As discussed recently on HN, the match count is useful information even where all matching results are not displayed as it indicates whether or not a query is generic. Contrast search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Squeamish%20Ossifrage&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> (one result as of this writing).
- JohnFen 4y agoIt's really weird, isn't it, how much Google managed to degrade the one thing it historically did the best?
- aceazzameen 4y agoI do exactly this. Google and Duckduckgo/Bing all provide better Youtube results than Youtube. I kind of hate the UX of platform now. But there's still so much great content on there from it's better days.
- khyryk 4y agoI've had videos not show up in the YouTube search despite the query matching the video title verbatim.
- dd36 4y agoSame
- tartoran 4y agoYep, I confirm that is my experience as well. Google is starting to inch towards the television industry. In all honesty Im not watching any TV these days but i imagine its some advertising and snippets of content. Youtube without membership or ad blockers is just like that if not worse. From how if started to what is has become it’s a long way…
- toss1 4y agoYup. I now pretty much use YouTube search only to call up a video where I have the YT ID. Everything else is a waste of time, and I just use DDG search if I want to find something without the ID in hand. How management thinks it is a good idea to make their products useless by letting a bunch of self-aggrandizing "analysts" or marketers or whatever attempt to manipulate their customers/viewers is beyond me. The fact that they are all paid to fork it up so badly is just mindboggling.
- 14 4y agoMyspace was the place to be until one day it wasn’t. YouTube is a behemoth but it too could fall one day. For now the amount of information it has is just too valuable but it is becoming less enjoyable to use the site all the time. On iOS I don’t have an Adblock and am forced to watch countless ads and then When I watch the ad the video fails to load. So I refresh and sometimes that works sometimes I need to do it several times before the video will play. It is a shame they have gone so downhill over the years for us old enough to remember the beginnings.
- chizhik-pyzhik 4y agoPrepend your search with 'intitle:' and you'll get results with the string in the title.
- tb0ne 4y agoYes, Youtube litters search results with completely unrelated "recommended videos". One trick to get rid of them is to select one/any additional search filter (for example select HD only). It is absolutely ridiculous that you have to do this, but it works for now.
- brigandish 4y agoSearch is entirely crippled for new stories now. If I saw some breaking news on Twitter I used to pop over to Youtube to find original or better footage than news services were getting, or to get it faster. Impossible via YT's search now, it's just pages and pages of old-media channels with their thoughts on the footage, always clipped down and talked over. Even Twitter seems to do this now, it's becoming harder to find stuff that doesn't have a large slathering of approved views slathered over the top.
- ipaddr 4y agoDo you ever filter by day, month, week?
- brigandish 4y agoI've tried everything I can think of but it seems that news on Youtube is now much like watching television. If there's a trick I don't know it, though it looks like Yandex will have a new customer.
- honkler 4y agoyou will watch ze approved media, and you will be happy.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- narrator 4y agoYandex.com, my friend. It even returns results from Ulta Cancelled video websites like Bitchute, Rumble and Odyssey.
- 14 4y agoI’ve recently started using yandex lately and have say I also find it refreshing. My favourite is the image search I just find it superior to other search engines.
- hanniabu 4y ago> Sadly, it seems that Google has intentionally diminished Youtube's own search function in order to prioritize use of the recommendation system. That's because recommended videos are more popular, and more popular videos earn them more ad revenue.
- JohnFen 4y agoThat argument makes sense to explain why recommendations are terrible, but not why search is terrible.
- mirekrusin 4y agoSo many smart people there and such an idiotic solution - this whole short sighted, mind narrowing, engagement "boosting" recommendation system must be trained on attention horizon of a fruit fly.
- dijonman2 4y agoIt’s also about engagement and avoiding offending folks via dislikes. IMO dislikes are essential.
- xani_ 4y agoIt's probably companies advertising their products getting salty their new movie or something got 90% downvotes and YT is all too eager to please its ad overlords.
- thejynxed 4y agoIt started when a Joe Biden speech video got disliked into oblivion. We're talking 2 million+ dislikes.
- mirekrusin 4y agoWhy not do things transparently and do weighting by default weight = upvotes - downvote + us cents paid by author, all 3 visible.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago"I get 5-10 results for any given query before Youtube gives up and just offers me recommendations rather than search results." I search from the command line using a short shell script.^1 Perhaps it depends on the query, but I consistently get more than 5-10 results. For example, I might get 26 reults with the initial query. By continuing the query repeatedly I can usually get over 1000 results total. YouTube search results are delivered as JSON so I wrote some simple, quick and dirty utilities in C to reformat the JSON to TSV with only the details I want. The workflow and example script below use those utilities, i.e., yy059, yy062 and yy064. # YouTube search workflow: # initial query 1.sh query > results-file yy064 < results-file|yy062 > results.tsv # continuation 1.sh < results-file >> results-file yy064 < results-file|yy062 >> results.tsv 1. Example 14-line script using curl #!/bin/sh HOST=www.youtube.com; case $# in :) ;;0) KEY=AIzaSyAO_FJ2SlqU8Q4STEHLGCilw_Y9_11qcW8; MIN=\{\"context\":{\"client\":{\"hl\":\"en-US\",\"gl\":\"US\",\"clientName\":\"MWEB\",\"clientVersion\":\"2.20210916.06.01\"}},\"continuation\":; TOKEN=$(yy059|sed -n "s/$/}/;s/\"token\":/$MIN/p"|tail -1); URL=https://$HOST/youtubei/v1/search?key=$KEY curl --http1.1 -A "" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d "$TOKEN" "$URL" ;;*) S=$(echo "$@"|sed 's/ /+/g'); URL=https://$HOST/results?search_query=$S; curl --http1.1 -A "" "$URL" esac; I also have a short script that retrieves all video details for a given YouTube channel. These results are also delivered as JSON. I use search to discover interesting channels, then retrieve the full lists of videos for those channels. Absolutely agree that YouTube search got neutered.
- crxgames 4y agoIt's gotten so bad the past couple months. All I get now are maybe 2-3 videos maybe of what I want and everything else is some past shown BS that's not even related or recommendations. They want to become tiktok so bad. Edit: Add to that the increase in number of ads per video and their length...ugh
- brylie 4y agoPiped, an open-source YouTube frontend, has pretty good search results: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped https://piped.kavin.rocks/ https://piped.kavin.rocks/ https://piped-material.xn--17b.net/ https://piped-material.xn--17b.net/
- dredmorbius 4y agoDoes Piped (or the similar Invidious) provide its own search functionality or merely channel YouTube's? I suspect it might be supplying specific filters (e.g., "intitle", mentioned elsewhere in this thread) to YouTube's query engine.
- brylie 4y agoI'm not sure exactly, but here is a related line of code: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/blob/860ca92a4d49a85a378137b5682a7f9f267f86b8/src/components/SearchResults.vue#L93 https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/blob/860ca92a4d49a85a3781...
- dredmorbius 4y agoThanks. That looks strongly like a simple pass-through.
- krono 4y agoHere are some uBlock Origin rules to get rid of all that crap in your search results: youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-item-section-renderer>#contents>:not(ytd-video-renderer),ytd-secondary-search-container-renderer youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-video-renderer:has(.badge:has-text(/new/i)) youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer ytd-compact-video-renderer:has(.badge:has-text(/new/i))
- crxgames 4y agoYou are a gentleman and a scholar!
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoIt’s crazy how bad it’s getting. If I search a recipe I’ll get 6-10 results then it’s just random other stuff from the same channels. Kinda think there are more than 10 videos about a major food dish on YT. Starting to think the backend has a concept of “blessed” channels to surface
- xnx 4y agoYouTube's search has never been as good as Google's for finding videos because Google search knows about the video and also an entire crawled web of links and references.