Ask HN: What's Going on with YouTube Search? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's Going on with YouTube Search?

Not sure if this a bug or feature.

I searched for pro wrestling videos (I know), and mixed in with my search results where:

- cryptocurrency videos

- stock picking videos

- teenage reaction videos about random subjects

- a video about white supremacists

I really don't know what's going on. These videos have nothing to do with my search query, subscriptions or previous searches on youtube or elsewhere on Google.

They're not marked as ads either, they're just presented as straight search results - and there is no way to hide or block them.

What is going on with Youtube, are they so intent on torpedoing this business...

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My guess is that they are blurring the lines between "results" and "recommendations" and optimizing for what people are most likely to click on.

Twitter must do something similar. I don't have an account, and every time I follow a link to a Twitter post, like from HN, all the posts shown below it are not about the original and are typically about polarizing political things.

Yeah noticed this as well. There might only be one or two actual results from the search, the rest of recommendations that arent even related. I noticed this occurs more when I search for "unsavory" videos or podcasts. I think its a method of soft censorship, youtube channels can upload videos, but youtube will make them essentially undiscoverable unless you know the exact search terms

Youtube will also seemingly halt the "results" about halfway down the page to insert a section with personalized suggestions completely unrelated to the search query. Baffling.

I agree, it's been pretty weird that way. Where outright ads would otherwise be, there are just results that don't fit your search. But I guess those videos _could_ be thought of as ads, since that's the way the platform works--ad-oriented results are viral to the inner workings of Youtube.

It would be less jarring if they were at least marked out visually some way to differentiate them from my search.

And youtube trending is literal anathema to me, they are showing me things I literally hate. Not very conducive, especially when I am actively searching....for something specific.

Madness

For sure, things have changed in annoying ways! BTW have you tried the RSS-style feeds in apps like NewPipe? I find that I at least get a nice dose of content I'm interested in, that way...

What is going on is that they are a search company, experts at this, they know better than you what you want to see /s

I think all industries and companies in the world that have any online presence are AI mapped to a vector space representing their alignment with Google's preferred political goals/allies.

They internally call it AI fairness or whatever.

It probably is the case that in this representation entertainment such as WWE and MMA ends up being viewed unfavourably by Google since they are vaguely associated with political powers that want to limit tech censorship, etc.

I think this is happening and it is bad.

Since results are highly personalized one way to fight this would be to install search bias monitoring extensions and statistically proving that results are intentionally biased for censoring porposes(which I think amounts to abuse of market dominance)

To avoid such monitoring Google is going to roll out strong restrictions on allowed browser extensions(linke manifest v3 in the name of privacy) at the same time meta/fb is just banning accounts in order to stop statistocal monitoring of their bias. [1]

Expect more of this unchecked soft censorship as user rights and tech accountability slowly diminish.

1:https://www.eff.org/es/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-attack-re...

It feels like you've made an unnecesarrily conspiratorial leap here, when a much simpler variant will do.

In this case -- people who watch WWE also tend to watch (or are more likely to watch) the things being reccomended to the OP: crypto/daytading/white supremacists/etc.

This doesn't require some shadowy _explicit_ google political bias overlay, there's just some latent feature in the reccomendation algorithm that links them.

In case your account could be banned (and, looking through your history, it seems a possibility), I wanted to reach out while I still have the chance and say I'd be happy to speak with you longer term. https://philosopher.life/#Contact%20h0p3. No matter what, I wish you luck, nomad.

If I see the face of that damn "ex-Google techlead peddling whatever nonsense in 2022", I am gonna seriously loose it. I prided myself in keeping a neat and disciplined YT feed for the longest time (careful manual curation). But last 2 weeks have been absolute garbage.

They have a monopoly so they can do stupid experiments without repercussions

Yeah sounds like Amazon's customers also viewed kind of thing. YouTube's recommendation algo is really not very good and optimises for the wrong KPIs (from a user's pov) I think.

What was your query? I search for "pro wrestling videos" and "WWE" and only got wrestling videos.

Anyway can anyone from Google chime in (maybe using a throwaway)? Has there been a increased focus to improve ad metrics? Quality of search products has really gone to the dogs

it was "botchamania", it's like a comedy series related to wrestling. but that channel has had a lot of issues with dcma takedowns in the past...

They must have put you on new algo, it get all botchamania videos

Searched for of a metal band. The results were full of Pakistani movie reviews.

Luckily, Spotify search still works.

yeah, it really seems like a bug to me.

Sorry i am that guy watching pro wrestling and searching for crypto, stocks and documentaries

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