5 ms·

I love that a third party is stepping up here, but it's incomprehensible to me that Google doesn't do this themselves. They're a search company, and they own Yo

by derefr 3y ago

I love that a third party is stepping up here, but it's incomprehensible to me that Google doesn't do this themselves. They're a search company, and they own YouTube. The YouTube data — including the subtitle files — is already sitting there on their servers; they don't have to scrape it, they just have to index it. What are they even doing? Fun thing to try: do a Google search with "site:youtube.com" in it. You get basically nothing, no matter what keywords you use. It seems that Google actually entirely ignores/excludes YouTube from their regular HTML indexing, and instead only relies on the YouTube backend to actively push content into (a special, separate part of) the search index. Which gets you "results from YouTube" and "video search" — but doesn't get you the ability to search youtube videos pages qua web pages. (Consider: you can find a post in a Reddit comment thread on Google. Can you find a post in a YouTube video comments section on Google?) Heck, when I first heard about YouTube's autogenerated captions, my first thought was "oh, so this is Google building deep indexing of video through audio transcription, because they can't trust externally-provided subtitles, right?" But it's been 10 years, and I couldn't have been more wrong.

mrazomor 3y ago
Probably because YouTube =! Google Search, while YouTube is still a subset of Google. So, going an extra mile for YouTube and not for others might put Google Search in anti competition issues. Then again, I also find it absurd. YouTube is one of the most valuable parts of the Internet. And its lack of searchability is criminal. At least the YT search itself should make up for it. It's shame it doesn't.
- derefr 3y ago
  Google doesn't necessarily have to do anything special for YouTube, though. Google could "just" index YouTube videos as if they were any other web pages, in a standard way. It would then be YouTube's job, to make the data inside those video pages legible to Google's indexer. Where Google could enable this, by pushing for web standards to increase machine-legibility of video in HTML — e.g. standardized ARIA-accessible captions sources for the <video> element, etc. If they got it set up such that in theory any web spider could come along and index a YouTube video — then there would be no anti-trust reason that Google couldn't just directly ingest the subtitle files off their own servers; it'd just be a bandwidth-saving optimization over the scraping process that they could otherwise do.
  - userbinator 3y ago
    e.g. standardized ARIA-accessible captions sources for the <video> element, etc. YouTube could literally be a minimal web forum with a video tag in the first post of each thread, but likely due to DRM and related motivations, they instead wrap everything in thick layers of obfuscated JS. Comments were easily indexable too, before that was also removed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11053204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11053204 For a while there were various shady-looking sites that seemed to scrape YouTube video pages (including comments) and I could sometimes find them through Google (then going back to YouTube for the original video), but within the past few years those have unfortunately also either been delisted/censored from search results or died out.
stingraycharles 3y ago
There’s a company founded by a friend of mine called MediaDistillery, who are doing awesome stuff in this area. Real-time searchable massive video archives, with contextual understanding (e.g. “a WW2 fragment with a Jewish mother holding her baby”). Super useful for so many purposes. And then there’s YouTube where you can’t even search subtitles. It makes me shake my head. Google seems to be at the forefront of AI, but doesn’t seem to be able to turn all that expertise into relevant products. Maybe the recent disruptions will shake them awake?
- methou 3y ago
  I mustn't be searching it right, I can only get this company: https://mediadistillery.com/ https://mediadistillery.com/ , the feature you mentioned is not accessible, and has that Ad-tech smell.
choppaface 3y ago
They do have search in video but the launch was kinda miffed https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/google-tests-text-search-for-segments-in-youtube-clips/639130/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/google-tests-text-sear...
hysan 3y ago
I would posit that google has determined that it’s more profitable to keep viewers on YouTube via controlling the viewing experience vs whatever additional ad revenue they’d gain by making videos more easily indexable. I’m basing this hypothesis on YouTube’s consistent trend of removing features related to controlling your own viewing experience. For example, removing subscription collections.
- derefr 3y ago
  How would making videos more indexible move people off of YouTube? Once you're there, you'd stay there, with all the current recommender algorithms still in effect; all the external indexability would do is give Google (and Bing, and everyone else) more reasons to lead you into that labyrinth.
  - dmbche 3y ago
    If you get information by reading text on your terminal you didn't see the ads - I think the thinking stops there.
  - belter 3y ago
    The same way they did a few weeks ago, when they changed the interface to only show you the options "Latest" and "Popular" for a channel, instead of the drop down box that was present before. You could get a list of most recent or older videos. They are about keeping you engaged and keep suggesting to users what they think will keep you engaged with the platform. It's an entertainment platform not a library...
    - refulgentis 3y ago
      I don’t understand, can you explain more?
      - belter 3y ago
        I mean this: "Tell HN: YouTube's web UI just got even worse" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371268 They used to have a drop down box, for oldest or most recent, when you clicked on the tab Videos for a YouTube channel. Now you will notice, it has now a "Latest" and "Popular", something that of course the algorithm will decide upon...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Pazzaz 3y ago
I think you're exaggerating a little when you say "site:youtube.com" doesn't work. If I search 'site:youtube.com apple watch' I get 143 000 000 results, and if I search something more specific like 'site:youtube.com "Featuring Dr James Grime"' I'll find exactly what I'm looking for. But you're correct that it doesn't seem to search video comments, only titles and descriptions.
- derefr 3y ago
  The problem I ran into is that, like I said, YouTube doesn't seem to get indexed by hypertext inward-edges from other sites like a regular website does — and so you can't search by how you recall a video being described in pages that link to it; instead, you have to remember how the video describes itself. Which it may not always do well.
sharess 3y ago
Social media companies are in a constant tug-of-war against the end users when it comes to controlling what the users see. The ideal is that the user has absolutely no control over on what they see and the social media company can fully dictate content. That is what makes the money. Allowing users to freely query content in their own websites is completely antithetical to what they are trying to do. YouTube is also very aggressive in preventing scraping and limiting the usage of the official API. Which is quite ironic considering the history of the company.
- flenserboy 3y ago
  Google: appeared open to start things off, then went whole hog on the MS embrace-and-extend philosophy, aiming to crush the life out of the entire web.
ranting-moth 3y ago
Conflict of interests. They want you faffing around provisioning all those valuable clicks for them to sell.
gniv 3y ago
Beyond conspiracy theories it's interesting to speculate why Google is not providing native search-in-subtitles and search-in-comments. The easiest explanation is that they don't trust the quality. They probably tried it and reached the conclusion that it doesn't improve search in any meaningful direction. I know from experience that search in user reviews is very hard. Unless you really understand the review (which was tried via sentiment analysis) you cannot rank results well. But now with the new LLM models I think it would work better.
- davidy123 3y ago
  I think Google is now thoroughly infected with Big-Company-itis. A couple departments would like to and know how to comprehensively use AI across many services, which the consumers would love (though some would be confused by it). But legal, marketing, and some guy in a department called "Annex B?" are preventing it. So then the people in those departments get bored and go somewhere else and their perspectives and skills are lost.
- ramraj07 3y ago
  I’m pretty sure google uses the captions in search. As long as you search from within YouTube. I regularly search for keywords and find hourlong videos where it’s mentioned somewhere in the middle and nowhere in the description.
  - gniv 3y ago
    I still have doubts. Google uses anchors heavily in search, so it's hard to prove if a result is due to matches in captions or in a website linking to the video. Would be good to find proof one way or another.
    - ramraj07 3y ago
      FWIW I tried to find the norm MacDonald clip where he sings about the "impossible bat" and YouTube was spot on.
  - roncesvalles 3y ago
dizhn 3y ago
Google doesn't even do a lot simpler things like searching by language or location. And the search is garbage. I am trying to learn Italian so that's what I am interested in but even when I enter a search term spelled correctly with its accents and everything I get anything from Brazilian Portuguese to French. They do a very helfpul translation of the term and return results that are unfortunately useless to me. (I would have loved to speak every language but I don't)
- Jakob 3y ago
  The default behaviour for multiple languages is bad, but the settings page for both region, and search results language work well. In case you haven’t seen the settings, yet.
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    I wish. I have set English and Portuguese only, in that order, and it keeps showing me Spanish, Italian, French. Oh, and how about setting the default account among the many I’m logged in. Or the disable auto play setting that keeps getting reset every week.
- gniv 3y ago
  On web search, you can append &lr=lang_it to the URL. Maybe make it into a Chrome extension.
  - dizhn 3y ago
    This does not seem to be doing anything. It's also being removed from the url bar when the page loads.
    - gniv 3y ago
      Weird. It works for me (on google.com), including from an incognito window.
yosito 3y ago
At one point Google claimed their mission was to "organize the world's information and make it accessible". That's proven to be just as much of a joke as "Do no evil".
- MildlySerious 3y ago
  For all I care, they lost that claim with [Deleted video] - and by that I don't mean that they remove videos, for which there are countless valid reasons, but that there is no way to see what it was you liked, and that the lists you curate just deteriorate. There are many other, maybe more valid reasons they fail this mission, but that's the one that has plaguing me the longest.
pmoriarty 3y ago
YouTube doesn't have to be good. It just needs to do the minimum it needs to keep users from switching to a different platform... which, because of the network effect of so many people and videos being on it, is not much at all. If they had serious competition, they'd have to do more to keep users, but no such competition exists.
- lettergram 3y ago
  There’s twitch and I think Rumble is going to give it a run for it’s money. I grant Rumble is only 1% the size of YouTube by viewership, but I think that’ll shift fairly rapidly and we can see 10% on rumble in 3 years. My analysis https://austingwalters.com/an-analysis-on-rumble-nasdaq-rum/ https://austingwalters.com/an-analysis-on-rumble-nasdaq-rum/
  - hackernewds 3y ago
    Rumble will perish due to its controversial niche, which mind-numbingly is also its main moat
    - VirtualVoyager 3y ago
      [dead]
    - dividedbyzero 3y ago
      I've not come across Rumble yet, is this comparable to Twitter vs. Truth Social (minus the drama)?
      - lettergram 3y ago
        It’s closer to something between YouTube and twitch; they’re trying to grow by targeting the niches kicked off of youtube and twitch To put in perspective: there’s a ton of attorneys on there, right and left wing pundits that had their channels kicked off YouTube. They also have UFC, sports, gaming, gun channels, etc. and that seems to be where they’re trying to grow most.
guerrilla 3y ago
> but it's incomprehensible to me that Google doesn't do this themselves. How is it incomprehensible that they don't give a shit about what you want to see and only care about what's profitable to them for you to see?
reaperducer 3y ago
Heck, when I first heard about YouTube's autogenerated captions Off-topic, but since I don't use YouTube and you do, in your experience, how are the auto-generated captions? Are they accurate? I've been unimpressed by speech-to-text engines in the past, so I'm interested to hear if this is a problem that Google's managed to solve.
jameshart 3y ago
How do you think monopoly regulators would like it if YouTube videos were indexed with higher accuracy and detail in google searches than Vimeo video? So sure, google can say ‘here’s a standard way to provide subtitles for a video which we’ll index’, but then that becomes a complete SEO side channel - google needs to validate that the subtitles actually match the content. And that means their bots downloading the video itself. And google really doesn’t want to go out there and argue that video needs to be downloadable by bots, because that’s the whole YouTube-dl case right there.
jimmySixDOF 3y ago
Rule #50 The better the Catalog, the Worse the Interface Spotify and YouTube are the leading examples but there are definitely others.
andai 3y ago
As far as I can tell, Google (but not YouTube?) does search YouTube transcripts. I have successfully Googled text in a video's transcript and found that video. The transcripts themselves are pretty bad though (Google's using old tech). They're usually good enough for auto-summarization though.
rasz 3y ago
Google does it, Youtube does not. Google will find a video when you search for a phrase that was said in it (as long as its bad speech recognition got it right), it will find a video with a text that shows up on an object with enough clarity to OCR (for example electronic component name on a pcb in the foreground). There is one plot twist - Google will not always do it when you search for VIDEO specifically :) but will gladly give you videos when searching text/images :) Youtube search on the other hand will try - suggest something you liked that has nothing to do with the search term entered - popular videos at this moment - videos mildly related to proper results. One of them had a horse in it? clearly you want more horses! - videos with title mildly related to search term - to ignore upload date filter when they panic (Christchurch mosque massacre). For example YT search for "Si5351A" limited to this month will give 11 somewhat proper results mostly with "Si5351" (no A postfix) in title/description AND some dude DXing in Indonesian "Menerima Modif Radio Yaesu FTC 1540A Ke DDS System" because "Si5351A" is a "DDS" so its the same thing right? Its like when Im looking for "NSR Ro80" you should show me plenty of other cars because Ro80 is a car :). Searching for Si5351A without quote marks will show one additional video with Si5351B in the title. Gets better, searching Google Video for Si5351A last month also gives ~11 results, but only 4 of those are direct YT links :]
zip1 3y ago
It's quite intriguing that Google doesn't offer full-text search capabilities for YouTube, considering its position as a leading search company. However, I think there are several reasons for this, some of which may not be immediately apparent. Firstly, if Google did offer this feature, it would likely be targeted by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) exploits. In essence, any time a new search parameter is introduced, there's a risk of it being manipulated to prioritize certain content—especially by those interested in gaming the system for increased visibility or monetary gain. If YouTube's search feature were to be plagued by such spamming, it could severely degrade the user experience and lead to Google having to strip it away. While not a guarantee, it's a probable outcome given the history of SEO misuse. Secondly, YouTube's primary focus is on its recommendation algorithm rather than search functionality. With billions of videos hosted, the key goal is to keep users engaged by serving up content they're likely to enjoy, thereby increasing view times and ad revenue. The search feature, while useful, is not as integral to this objective. Further, offering full-text search could provide yet another avenue to manipulate the algorithm, which YouTube surely wants to avoid. Finally, implementing and maintaining such a feature would require substantial resources. It would necessitate hiring teams of high-salaried employees to moderate and ensure fair use of the feature, adding considerable operational costs. Considering these factors, it seems that Google has made a strategic decision to avoid this feature for now. That said, the fact that third-party solutions are emerging, such as the one shared here, shows that there's a demand for full-text search capabilities. It also underscores the potential that these solutions have when unencumbered by the constraints faced by a tech giant like Google. This provides a fascinating insight into the dynamic relationship between third-party developers and tech corporations and the way they can complement each other.
- 2020aj 3y ago
  Regarding your second point... I think it's still important because recommendation algorithms work better when users can find content they enjoy outside of the recommended content. If they can't then the recommendations will become stale.
- dingledork69 3y ago
  > With billions of videos hosted, the key goal is to keep users engaged by serving up content they're likely to enjoy, thereby increasing view times and ad revenue Maybe for some users. I just use youtube to find a specific video I need (because people have stopped writing useful how-to's now that they can just make a 10 minute video covering about 1 minute worth of text), and a full text search would be so, so useful.
StrangeATractor 3y ago
Have you tried searching through your call history on a Google phone? It's awful. You'd think they'd have a solid search built in but it's nearly useless. Especially considering you're usually searching for that number you only dialed once and isn't in your contacts and is for some reason excluded from your recents, so you go into your call history (strangely hidden behind a menu) and...there's no search function. WTF? You'd think you could filter by area code, date or a general time which the call took place, Google is a search company after all, right? Or am I subtly being nudged to use some of their more profitable products to try and find it again? FOSS dialer recommendations are welcome btw.
- zo1 3y ago
  As much as I like to generally, I wouldn't blame Google for this, rather I blame the entire field of "UX".
- whitemary 3y ago
  It works as good as Windows search, no better
- bob_theslob646 3y ago
  I have this same exact problem. I thought I was crazy. The call history on Android/Pixel is absolutely terrible.
drumhead 3y ago
Its Google, the obvious seems to elude them even when its sitting in front of them.
ttctciyf 3y ago
> Google search with "site:youtube.com" in it. You get basically nothing That is not my experience! I regularly resort to this when the crappy inbuilt youtube search, which prefers to throw out algorithmic recommendations over returning actual search results, fails to come up with the goods. Do you really get no results for, say: https://www.google.com/search?&q=intitle%3A%22thomas+brinkmann%22+site%3Ayoutube.com https://www.google.com/search?&q=intitle%3A%22thomas+brinkma... ?
freedomben 3y ago
I believe Bard has the capability of searching youtube transcripts
dredmorbius 3y ago
Some of us recall that when Google+ launched it lacked any search whatsoever. That this was the case with a company whose name is synonymous with online search was ... simply mind-boggling. The platform eventually did get search (actually a few different implementations), which varied between mostly useless to actually reasonably functional, though I'll note that HN's Algolia-based search is vastly more useful on an ongoing basis. G+'s content, to the extent it survives at all, is largely on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine which ... lacks search.
fatneckbeard 3y ago
i used to imagine similar opportunities with google books. but they have done basically nothing with it. and that's been like 20 years. if anyone could have disrupted the corrupt and unfair academic publishing world, it was Google. they just found it an uninteresting task. they preferred to work on G+, Stadia, Google Code, etc, https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
whitemary 3y ago
YouTube profits from people scrubbing videos. Why on Earth would they want to offer full text search instead?
crazygringo 3y ago
Google already does this themselves. If you search for rare words (e.g. try "indubitably") it will absolutely pull up videos that have the word in the auto-generated transcript and nowhere else (not in descriptions, not in comments). Also, using "site:youtube.com" on Google works perfectly for me. If I look up "site:youtube.com david letterman" it gives me the David Letterman channel, followed by a seemingly infinite number of Letterman clips. Precisely what I'd expect. The only thing I can reproduce that you're complaining about is that Google (and YouTube) search don't seem to index YouTube user comments, in contrast to Reddit. But Google doesn't seem to index comments-attached-to-content anywhere on the internet -- not even comments on articles at mainstream publications like the New York Times. Which is probably more of a feature than a bug -- comments on both YouTube videos and news articles tend to be a lot of emotional reactions and repeated opinions which aren't worth searching at all. In contrast, many (not all) Reddit threads are often very informative and the "main content", so it makes sense Google indexes them. So I don't really see anything to complain about here, from my perspective.
- harshreality 3y ago
  What I'd expect is that "having a distribution that's both radially symmetric" site:youtube.com would return 3b1b's "Why π is in the normal distribution" video, which has that in subtitles at 22:28. Even without the site: term, all I get is an allreadable.com page that's scraped the subtitles for that video. Allreadable appears at first glance to be a site owned by someone in China and hosted on liquidweb.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    I just checked and it returns that video as the first result if you put your phrase into the YouTube search box in quotes, so that's good news. I wonder why YouTube indexes the transcripts for YouTube search, but Google chooses not to include them in its index for Google search? Seems like an intentional decision since it's the same company after all.

by derefr 3y ago

mrazomor 3y ago

Probably because YouTube =! Google Search, while YouTube is still a subset of Google. So, going an extra mile for YouTube and not for others might put Google Search in anti competition issues. Then again, I also find it absurd. YouTube is one of the most valuable parts of the Internet. And its lack of searchability is criminal. At least the YT search itself should make up for it. It's shame it doesn't.

derefr 3y ago
Google doesn't necessarily have to do anything special for YouTube, though. Google could "just" index YouTube videos as if they were any other web pages, in a standard way. It would then be YouTube's job, to make the data inside those video pages legible to Google's indexer. Where Google could enable this, by pushing for web standards to increase machine-legibility of video in HTML — e.g. standardized ARIA-accessible captions sources for the <video> element, etc. If they got it set up such that in theory any web spider could come along and index a YouTube video — then there would be no anti-trust reason that Google couldn't just directly ingest the subtitle files off their own servers; it'd just be a bandwidth-saving optimization over the scraping process that they could otherwise do.
- userbinator 3y ago
  e.g. standardized ARIA-accessible captions sources for the <video> element, etc. YouTube could literally be a minimal web forum with a video tag in the first post of each thread, but likely due to DRM and related motivations, they instead wrap everything in thick layers of obfuscated JS. Comments were easily indexable too, before that was also removed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11053204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11053204 For a while there were various shady-looking sites that seemed to scrape YouTube video pages (including comments) and I could sometimes find them through Google (then going back to YouTube for the original video), but within the past few years those have unfortunately also either been delisted/censored from search results or died out.

stingraycharles 3y ago

There’s a company founded by a friend of mine called MediaDistillery, who are doing awesome stuff in this area. Real-time searchable massive video archives, with contextual understanding (e.g. “a WW2 fragment with a Jewish mother holding her baby”). Super useful for so many purposes. And then there’s YouTube where you can’t even search subtitles. It makes me shake my head. Google seems to be at the forefront of AI, but doesn’t seem to be able to turn all that expertise into relevant products. Maybe the recent disruptions will shake them awake?

methou 3y ago
I mustn't be searching it right, I can only get this company: https://mediadistillery.com/ https://mediadistillery.com/ , the feature you mentioned is not accessible, and has that Ad-tech smell.

choppaface 3y ago

They do have search in video but the launch was kinda miffed https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/google-tests-text-search-for-segments-in-youtube-clips/639130/ https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/google-tests-text-sear...

hysan 3y ago

I would posit that google has determined that it’s more profitable to keep viewers on YouTube via controlling the viewing experience vs whatever additional ad revenue they’d gain by making videos more easily indexable. I’m basing this hypothesis on YouTube’s consistent trend of removing features related to controlling your own viewing experience. For example, removing subscription collections.

derefr 3y ago
How would making videos more indexible move people off of YouTube? Once you're there, you'd stay there, with all the current recommender algorithms still in effect; all the external indexability would do is give Google (and Bing, and everyone else) more reasons to lead you into that labyrinth.
- dmbche 3y ago
  If you get information by reading text on your terminal you didn't see the ads - I think the thinking stops there.
- belter 3y ago
  The same way they did a few weeks ago, when they changed the interface to only show you the options "Latest" and "Popular" for a channel, instead of the drop down box that was present before. You could get a list of most recent or older videos. They are about keeping you engaged and keep suggesting to users what they think will keep you engaged with the platform. It's an entertainment platform not a library...
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    I don’t understand, can you explain more?
    - belter 3y ago
      I mean this: "Tell HN: YouTube's web UI just got even worse" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371268 They used to have a drop down box, for oldest or most recent, when you clicked on the tab Videos for a YouTube channel. Now you will notice, it has now a "Latest" and "Popular", something that of course the algorithm will decide upon...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Pazzaz 3y ago

I think you're exaggerating a little when you say "site:youtube.com" doesn't work. If I search 'site:youtube.com apple watch' I get 143 000 000 results, and if I search something more specific like 'site:youtube.com "Featuring Dr James Grime"' I'll find exactly what I'm looking for. But you're correct that it doesn't seem to search video comments, only titles and descriptions.

derefr 3y ago
The problem I ran into is that, like I said, YouTube doesn't seem to get indexed by hypertext inward-edges from other sites like a regular website does — and so you can't search by how you recall a video being described in pages that link to it; instead, you have to remember how the video describes itself. Which it may not always do well.

sharess 3y ago

Social media companies are in a constant tug-of-war against the end users when it comes to controlling what the users see. The ideal is that the user has absolutely no control over on what they see and the social media company can fully dictate content. That is what makes the money. Allowing users to freely query content in their own websites is completely antithetical to what they are trying to do. YouTube is also very aggressive in preventing scraping and limiting the usage of the official API. Which is quite ironic considering the history of the company.

flenserboy 3y ago
Google: appeared open to start things off, then went whole hog on the MS embrace-and-extend philosophy, aiming to crush the life out of the entire web.

ranting-moth 3y ago

Conflict of interests. They want you faffing around provisioning all those valuable clicks for them to sell.

gniv 3y ago

Beyond conspiracy theories it's interesting to speculate why Google is not providing native search-in-subtitles and search-in-comments. The easiest explanation is that they don't trust the quality. They probably tried it and reached the conclusion that it doesn't improve search in any meaningful direction. I know from experience that search in user reviews is very hard. Unless you really understand the review (which was tried via sentiment analysis) you cannot rank results well. But now with the new LLM models I think it would work better.

davidy123 3y ago
I think Google is now thoroughly infected with Big-Company-itis. A couple departments would like to and know how to comprehensively use AI across many services, which the consumers would love (though some would be confused by it). But legal, marketing, and some guy in a department called "Annex B?" are preventing it. So then the people in those departments get bored and go somewhere else and their perspectives and skills are lost.
ramraj07 3y ago
I’m pretty sure google uses the captions in search. As long as you search from within YouTube. I regularly search for keywords and find hourlong videos where it’s mentioned somewhere in the middle and nowhere in the description.
- gniv 3y ago
  I still have doubts. Google uses anchors heavily in search, so it's hard to prove if a result is due to matches in captions or in a website linking to the video. Would be good to find proof one way or another.
  - ramraj07 3y ago
    FWIW I tried to find the norm MacDonald clip where he sings about the "impossible bat" and YouTube was spot on.
- roncesvalles 3y ago

dizhn 3y ago

Google doesn't even do a lot simpler things like searching by language or location. And the search is garbage. I am trying to learn Italian so that's what I am interested in but even when I enter a search term spelled correctly with its accents and everything I get anything from Brazilian Portuguese to French. They do a very helfpul translation of the term and return results that are unfortunately useless to me. (I would have loved to speak every language but I don't)

Jakob 3y ago
The default behaviour for multiple languages is bad, but the settings page for both region, and search results language work well. In case you haven’t seen the settings, yet.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  I wish. I have set English and Portuguese only, in that order, and it keeps showing me Spanish, Italian, French. Oh, and how about setting the default account among the many I’m logged in. Or the disable auto play setting that keeps getting reset every week.
gniv 3y ago
On web search, you can append &lr=lang_it to the URL. Maybe make it into a Chrome extension.
- dizhn 3y ago
  This does not seem to be doing anything. It's also being removed from the url bar when the page loads.
  - gniv 3y ago
    Weird. It works for me (on google.com), including from an incognito window.

yosito 3y ago

At one point Google claimed their mission was to "organize the world's information and make it accessible". That's proven to be just as much of a joke as "Do no evil".

MildlySerious 3y ago
For all I care, they lost that claim with [Deleted video] - and by that I don't mean that they remove videos, for which there are countless valid reasons, but that there is no way to see what it was you liked, and that the lists you curate just deteriorate. There are many other, maybe more valid reasons they fail this mission, but that's the one that has plaguing me the longest.

pmoriarty 3y ago

YouTube doesn't have to be good. It just needs to do the minimum it needs to keep users from switching to a different platform... which, because of the network effect of so many people and videos being on it, is not much at all. If they had serious competition, they'd have to do more to keep users, but no such competition exists.

lettergram 3y ago
There’s twitch and I think Rumble is going to give it a run for it’s money. I grant Rumble is only 1% the size of YouTube by viewership, but I think that’ll shift fairly rapidly and we can see 10% on rumble in 3 years. My analysis https://austingwalters.com/an-analysis-on-rumble-nasdaq-rum/ https://austingwalters.com/an-analysis-on-rumble-nasdaq-rum/
- hackernewds 3y ago
  Rumble will perish due to its controversial niche, which mind-numbingly is also its main moat
  - VirtualVoyager 3y ago
    [dead]
  - dividedbyzero 3y ago
    I've not come across Rumble yet, is this comparable to Twitter vs. Truth Social (minus the drama)?
    - lettergram 3y ago
      It’s closer to something between YouTube and twitch; they’re trying to grow by targeting the niches kicked off of youtube and twitch To put in perspective: there’s a ton of attorneys on there, right and left wing pundits that had their channels kicked off YouTube. They also have UFC, sports, gaming, gun channels, etc. and that seems to be where they’re trying to grow most.

guerrilla 3y ago

> but it's incomprehensible to me that Google doesn't do this themselves. How is it incomprehensible that they don't give a shit about what you want to see and only care about what's profitable to them for you to see?

reaperducer 3y ago

Heck, when I first heard about YouTube's autogenerated captions Off-topic, but since I don't use YouTube and you do, in your experience, how are the auto-generated captions? Are they accurate? I've been unimpressed by speech-to-text engines in the past, so I'm interested to hear if this is a problem that Google's managed to solve.

jameshart 3y ago

How do you think monopoly regulators would like it if YouTube videos were indexed with higher accuracy and detail in google searches than Vimeo video? So sure, google can say ‘here’s a standard way to provide subtitles for a video which we’ll index’, but then that becomes a complete SEO side channel - google needs to validate that the subtitles actually match the content. And that means their bots downloading the video itself. And google really doesn’t want to go out there and argue that video needs to be downloadable by bots, because that’s the whole YouTube-dl case right there.

jimmySixDOF 3y ago

Rule #50 The better the Catalog, the Worse the Interface Spotify and YouTube are the leading examples but there are definitely others.

andai 3y ago

As far as I can tell, Google (but not YouTube?) does search YouTube transcripts. I have successfully Googled text in a video's transcript and found that video. The transcripts themselves are pretty bad though (Google's using old tech). They're usually good enough for auto-summarization though.

rasz 3y ago

Google does it, Youtube does not. Google will find a video when you search for a phrase that was said in it (as long as its bad speech recognition got it right), it will find a video with a text that shows up on an object with enough clarity to OCR (for example electronic component name on a pcb in the foreground). There is one plot twist - Google will not always do it when you search for VIDEO specifically :) but will gladly give you videos when searching text/images :) Youtube search on the other hand will try - suggest something you liked that has nothing to do with the search term entered - popular videos at this moment - videos mildly related to proper results. One of them had a horse in it? clearly you want more horses! - videos with title mildly related to search term - to ignore upload date filter when they panic (Christchurch mosque massacre). For example YT search for "Si5351A" limited to this month will give 11 somewhat proper results mostly with "Si5351" (no A postfix) in title/description AND some dude DXing in Indonesian "Menerima Modif Radio Yaesu FTC 1540A Ke DDS System" because "Si5351A" is a "DDS" so its the same thing right? Its like when Im looking for "NSR Ro80" you should show me plenty of other cars because Ro80 is a car :). Searching for Si5351A without quote marks will show one additional video with Si5351B in the title. Gets better, searching Google Video for Si5351A last month also gives ~11 results, but only 4 of those are direct YT links :]

zip1 3y ago

It's quite intriguing that Google doesn't offer full-text search capabilities for YouTube, considering its position as a leading search company. However, I think there are several reasons for this, some of which may not be immediately apparent. Firstly, if Google did offer this feature, it would likely be targeted by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) exploits. In essence, any time a new search parameter is introduced, there's a risk of it being manipulated to prioritize certain content—especially by those interested in gaming the system for increased visibility or monetary gain. If YouTube's search feature were to be plagued by such spamming, it could severely degrade the user experience and lead to Google having to strip it away. While not a guarantee, it's a probable outcome given the history of SEO misuse. Secondly, YouTube's primary focus is on its recommendation algorithm rather than search functionality. With billions of videos hosted, the key goal is to keep users engaged by serving up content they're likely to enjoy, thereby increasing view times and ad revenue. The search feature, while useful, is not as integral to this objective. Further, offering full-text search could provide yet another avenue to manipulate the algorithm, which YouTube surely wants to avoid. Finally, implementing and maintaining such a feature would require substantial resources. It would necessitate hiring teams of high-salaried employees to moderate and ensure fair use of the feature, adding considerable operational costs. Considering these factors, it seems that Google has made a strategic decision to avoid this feature for now. That said, the fact that third-party solutions are emerging, such as the one shared here, shows that there's a demand for full-text search capabilities. It also underscores the potential that these solutions have when unencumbered by the constraints faced by a tech giant like Google. This provides a fascinating insight into the dynamic relationship between third-party developers and tech corporations and the way they can complement each other.

2020aj 3y ago
Regarding your second point... I think it's still important because recommendation algorithms work better when users can find content they enjoy outside of the recommended content. If they can't then the recommendations will become stale.
dingledork69 3y ago
> With billions of videos hosted, the key goal is to keep users engaged by serving up content they're likely to enjoy, thereby increasing view times and ad revenue Maybe for some users. I just use youtube to find a specific video I need (because people have stopped writing useful how-to's now that they can just make a 10 minute video covering about 1 minute worth of text), and a full text search would be so, so useful.

StrangeATractor 3y ago

Have you tried searching through your call history on a Google phone? It's awful. You'd think they'd have a solid search built in but it's nearly useless. Especially considering you're usually searching for that number you only dialed once and isn't in your contacts and is for some reason excluded from your recents, so you go into your call history (strangely hidden behind a menu) and...there's no search function. WTF? You'd think you could filter by area code, date or a general time which the call took place, Google is a search company after all, right? Or am I subtly being nudged to use some of their more profitable products to try and find it again? FOSS dialer recommendations are welcome btw.

zo1 3y ago
As much as I like to generally, I wouldn't blame Google for this, rather I blame the entire field of "UX".
whitemary 3y ago
It works as good as Windows search, no better
bob_theslob646 3y ago
I have this same exact problem. I thought I was crazy. The call history on Android/Pixel is absolutely terrible.

drumhead 3y ago

Its Google, the obvious seems to elude them even when its sitting in front of them.

ttctciyf 3y ago

> Google search with "site:youtube.com" in it. You get basically nothing That is not my experience! I regularly resort to this when the crappy inbuilt youtube search, which prefers to throw out algorithmic recommendations over returning actual search results, fails to come up with the goods. Do you really get no results for, say: https://www.google.com/search?&q=intitle%3A%22thomas+brinkmann%22+site%3Ayoutube.com https://www.google.com/search?&q=intitle%3A%22thomas+brinkma... ?

freedomben 3y ago

I believe Bard has the capability of searching youtube transcripts

dredmorbius 3y ago

Some of us recall that when Google+ launched it lacked any search whatsoever. That this was the case with a company whose name is synonymous with online search was ... simply mind-boggling. The platform eventually did get search (actually a few different implementations), which varied between mostly useless to actually reasonably functional, though I'll note that HN's Algolia-based search is vastly more useful on an ongoing basis. G+'s content, to the extent it survives at all, is largely on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine which ... lacks search.

fatneckbeard 3y ago

i used to imagine similar opportunities with google books. but they have done basically nothing with it. and that's been like 20 years. if anyone could have disrupted the corrupt and unfair academic publishing world, it was Google. they just found it an uninteresting task. they preferred to work on G+, Stadia, Google Code, etc, https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

whitemary 3y ago

YouTube profits from people scrubbing videos. Why on Earth would they want to offer full text search instead?

crazygringo 3y ago

Google already does this themselves. If you search for rare words (e.g. try "indubitably") it will absolutely pull up videos that have the word in the auto-generated transcript and nowhere else (not in descriptions, not in comments). Also, using "site:youtube.com" on Google works perfectly for me. If I look up "site:youtube.com david letterman" it gives me the David Letterman channel, followed by a seemingly infinite number of Letterman clips. Precisely what I'd expect. The only thing I can reproduce that you're complaining about is that Google (and YouTube) search don't seem to index YouTube user comments, in contrast to Reddit. But Google doesn't seem to index comments-attached-to-content anywhere on the internet -- not even comments on articles at mainstream publications like the New York Times. Which is probably more of a feature than a bug -- comments on both YouTube videos and news articles tend to be a lot of emotional reactions and repeated opinions which aren't worth searching at all. In contrast, many (not all) Reddit threads are often very informative and the "main content", so it makes sense Google indexes them. So I don't really see anything to complain about here, from my perspective.

harshreality 3y ago
What I'd expect is that "having a distribution that's both radially symmetric" site:youtube.com would return 3b1b's "Why π is in the normal distribution" video, which has that in subtitles at 22:28. Even without the site: term, all I get is an allreadable.com page that's scraped the subtitles for that video. Allreadable appears at first glance to be a site owned by someone in China and hosted on liquidweb.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  I just checked and it returns that video as the first result if you put your phrase into the YouTube search box in quotes, so that's good news. I wonder why YouTube indexes the transcripts for YouTube search, but Google chooses not to include them in its index for Google search? Seems like an intentional decision since it's the same company after all.