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Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

> Google willingly interferes, in a heavy-handed way, with both search suggestions and search results

Indeed, they co-opt every search now. Anything related to local businesses or directions, flights and hotels, etc. And everything I try to find about pop culture or new tech or video games seems to be a page full of YouTube links. I want to grab the appropriate people at Google by the ear, and scream, "I DO NOT WANT TO SIT THROUGH A VIDEO ABOUT THIS." I guess I'm just old or something, but video seems like SUCH an inefficient way to impart information that could just be typed out, and then read. It's not even like it would be more work for these video producers. They're typing out the script to read over some generic video loops. JUST PUT THE COPY ON A PAGE! GAH!

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I hate the slow creep of video content everywhere. Especially in documentation. I can't ctrl-f a video looking for a keyword and never want to. Looking at you Hugging Face!

For reference: https://huggingface.co/transformers/preprocessing.html

One of the first things I do when evaluating something for work is look at the documentation.

If it is video, I move on to the next contender. That's simply a hard no.

Agreed. Videos can be nice as a support item for things that are visually oriented, but they do not replace a proper manual.

Try clicking on the three dots and then "Open transcript".

I think the videos exist because people think that's how they can get paid for their documentary work. If you add documentation to an open source project, they strip your name off and a bunch of randos edit your work to the point of unrecognizability. If you document something on your blog or website, you have to pay to host it. If you document something in the form of a YouTube video, the hosting is free, and you can click a button to have a penny deposited in your bank account every time someone clicks it. You can even do your own side deal and insert an ad wherever you want! That's why everything is a video these days, it's simple economics.

Certainly, there is still a lot of text in the world, but the reason things are moving towards videos is exactly because C-f doesn't work. You'll click a video hoping it will help, it won't, but the advertiser will still pay the content creator. If you visit a text-based website, search for what you're looking for, and don't find it, you'll be gone before the ads even load. And that was in a world where advertisers paid for text ads, which isn't the current world.

There are multiple free blog hosting sites.

Honestly, we need to rework what we consider to be an aggregator and what we consider to be a publisher.

I'd argue that Google these days fall in line more of a publisher than a search engine. More often than not I'm feeling that the search engine is trying to sell me something rather than do the work requested and I don't mean ads (which I think are good monetization balance).

Same goes for algorithm social networks.

"I guess I'm just old or something"

Fwiw, my teenage son prefers video content over written content. Even if you hate it, there are other people that love it.

But is that because the majority of the stuff being served to him by Google has been video for his experience on the internet, and that's what he's used to, or because it's better, or because he actually just prefers it. (And, to be fair, we're probably not talking about the same sort of information, but the question still applies generally.)

I've seen YouTube videos where the creator put the entire script in the video description so I can just pause the video and read the article. More people should do this.

Many videos now come with an auto-generated script, available by clicking on the three dots ("Open transcript"). Time stamps can be switched off if desired.

Yesterday I wanted to grab an image of flowers. Any flowers. I searched on flowers in image search. Google returned a page that was inundated with ads. I had trouble finding an image that I could use because it wasn’t an ad.

creative commons image search for "flowers": <https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?imgl=cc;p=flow...>

Learn to search (hint: searchlores), it is an immensely useful skill in this age of information; you don't need to be irked by bad tools any more.

yeah seriously who needs all this video junk that takes 5 minutes to say the 1 useful thing they have to say

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