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Worth noting that most of youtube videos can no longer be discovered through search. Search results can now only be sorted by "Relevance" and "Popularity" while
by lairv 6mo ago
Worth noting that most of youtube videos can no longer be discovered through search. Search results can now only be sorted by "Relevance" and "Popularity" while you used to be able to sort by release date
Search results are also non-exhaustive and biased towards recent videos as noted in this study https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11727 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11727
Basically many videos can no longer be discovered if you don't have a url to the video or the channel, and the algorithm doesn't recommend it
- dyauspitr 6mo agoThe non exhaustive thing is annoying as hell. You might as well delete old videos because there’s no way to get to them if you don’t remember the link. I used to be able to find this video I took in college 20 years ago. There’s just no way for me to get to it anymore.
- rschneid 6mo agoSounds like a good opportunity for a big indexing company to add some value by using thei- Wait...
- mixmastamyk 6mo agoIs that related to freetube removing the video tab (of a channel), sort by age dropdown menu?
- dyauspitr 6mo agoI don’t know. All I know is the video I’m looking for has a very unique title and used to come up as the main search result less than 3 years ago and it’s unfindable now. It’s from 2006.
- squishy47 6mo agoyou can add search filters to the search bar in youtube. e.g this will return videos published in that time range with a duration longer than 2m cat videos after:2014-01-01 before:2014-12-31 >2m [edit] - the duration doesn't remove shorts I think there's just no shorts published in that time range.
- Ferret7446 6mo agoRealistically you cannot make every video discoverable given the massive ever growing amount of content.
- lairv 6mo agoWikipedia says there's 14.8 billion videos currently uploaded to YouTube, it seems technically easy to index that amount of title+description? The more likely explanation is that Google doesn't want YouTube to be crawled, which gives them a massive moat for AI training
- NJRBailey 6mo agoI've noticed that the search is especially bad on the history tab, where even searching the exact title of a video I've seen before doesn't always display it. I've found that the best search for old or niche videos is to ask Gemini with a description of the video (I found it gives better results than GPT 5.1) but it's really unfortunate that the native search isn't more useful.