Google Steers Users to YouTube over Rivals | Hacker News Reader

Google Steers Users to YouTube over Rivals

wsj.com

31 pointskupatrupa18 comments

To be honest, when I do searches on google video, I always hope I get a youtube result. If it's not, it's often a webpage with an embedded youtube result, but the native non-youtube videos are even worse from a usability perspective. I sometimes use site:youtube.com to improve this. Youtube is just really good and the vast majority of competitors are bad.

Except for Vimeo. Vimeo is great. And I hope we get more youtube competitors.

EDIT: Also, I don't like the search system within Youtube itself. Googling for videos seems to work better.

afaik YT search works only on title/description text. Google video/image search includes transcripts and OCR

These types of moves really remind me of what caused Microsoft to get the ire of regulators in the 90s. Doesn't this seem pretty anti-competitive if it can be proved that the results from other companies are better, but youtube results are chosen instead. Of course the definition of "Better" is subjective, so there's a huge amount of wiggle room.

It's interesting that the "brand new" search engine seems like a dead industry. All of the newer competitors aren't starting from scratch and are just aggregating together results in new ways or focusing on privacy. Is it really that impossible to bring into existence a new search engine. For the vast majority of queries Google seems to only return major brands anyway.

The engine isn't the problem. The indices are. Google has massive amounts of data to index over, and they've been collecting it in useful form for longer than anyone else still in the game.

Good point, the data is the key. There's of course the common crawl data now, doing some sort of that plus deltas of "current" likely could be a starting point. But also turning that into usable indices that can be returned in milliseconds is an art I'm sure.

My main point still stands though. How is there not anyone willing to take another shot at competing here, the world's love affair with Google is no doubt over. DuckDuckGo is relatively popular even though it doesn't seem to offer anything truly original in the search space.

A truly new way to search that helps fight the monopolistic search behavior would be very useful. It feels like something Mozilla foundation would be into if they didn't receive so much funding from Google.

> How is there not anyone willing to take another shot at competing here

Cliqz did and they lost.

Bing image search and video search are way more accurate than Google for me.

Google still reigns supreme in the text search department though.

How relevant is the stale data however? Google started expiring old advertising data not because of any PR concerns but because it was useless to them even with cheap storage.

Search data isn't neccessarily user data but what good do the particulars of search data for long defunct domain names provide them? The only thing relevant now are any current archives to search.

I've lost count at the amount of times I've seen FB videos essentially be ripped off creators from YouTube and Vimeo.

It's so obvious as well, the quality of the video is far worse and sometimes zoomed in to hide watermarks.

I'll never directly visit a video on FB again.

Exactly. As much as I despise Googles practices, who would ever organically visit Facebook when in search of a video?

I've found Facebook video tends to be the source more often for live videos or recently live videos. For instance, my state's coronavirus briefings are live on their website and Facebook. When there were protests/riots in my town, videos of it happening were coming from Facebook, not YouTube. I presume at some point it ends up on YouTube, but for "current events" I find myself often bounced over to Facebook.

Meanwhile, I never find like... quality channel content anywhere but YouTube. The sort of thing where a scripted, well-recorded and annotated video is produced regularly... YouTube leads there by far.

Google will prioritize the video that gets more clicks from their results page. If I search for something and see both YT and FB links, I'm definitely going to YT, because I know it'll work (vs FB links which sometimes ask me to sign in, sometimes give me a vague permissions error, sometimes give me some other error).

https://archive.vn/01lSf

It's unfortunate that a major newspaper has a well-known bias (in this case, against Google). Makes it hard to trust anything they say on the subject; although a known bias is certainly better than a surreptitious one.

This is an incredibly ironic statement from a Google employee who is not disclosing such in this comment or their profile.

Engage with the comment; not the commenter. Some basic evidence:

https://www.google.com/search?q=rupert+murdoch+google&rlz=1C...

I am engaging with the comment, about how bias is bad, and surreptitious bias is worse... The fact that you're both working for the company in question is kinda relevant to that.

Would you care to cite some evidence rather than baselessly slander the 2nd largest US newspaper (by circulation)?

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