To improve search results on YouTube, use the search prefix “intitle:”
xn--1-zfa.com
xn--1-zfa.com
On a similar note, I've started noticing the third video in the "related videos" section on the right-hand sidebar is usually a new video with _extremely_ clickbait and inflammatory titles - sometimes with little connection to the topics I usually watch.
They're extremely distracting so I've set up a uBlock filter for these: `www.youtube.com##ytd-compact-video-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(3)`
This doesn't work 100% of the time, but it's good enough. (in particular, it fails if what I'm watching is a trailer video which makes the 2nd recommendation in the sidebar be a movie recommendation which doesn't fit this rule; as a result it blocks the 4th entry in the list, but oh well)
...and it probably does in the short term, as you just try to engage more with the software trying ever harder to find what you want. But probably also kills engagement in the long term. Personal experience with this: Facebook post-2020 vs Facebook pre-2015.
Facebook pre-2015 was so magical as I was finally reconnecting with long-lost school friends and childhood neighbors we long lost touch with (pre-email friends.)
Facebook post-2020 is me engaging desperately to see something other than the same 10 repeated posts per day...knowing full well that the magic is still in there, just not visible by default. And then one day I just stopped checking.
But yeah anyway, do you still know people who actually post on Facebook?
I don’t think any other social media came close to how purely good Facebook was in its golden years. I’d love for someone to write a book on how it declined.
I sometimes wonder if the opposite is true - that the PMs can convince the upper managment that users are staying on the website longer with all those stupid as fuck shit changes, but in reality they are there longer because it's increasingly more difficult to find anything you are looking for
Sort of 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure'
This mind trick is called the Gruen transfer.
well just watch... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG1NeA3WoKc
Never got there. After a brief detour in some Greek channels I can't comment on, I ended up in a seemingly endless loop of mindfully woke TEDx talks (as in, no political or inflammatory stuff, just different variations of "how to live your life to the fullest", "this is how your brain works", "the secret to to happiness/productivity/communication...", etc.
Logged in:
Watching RedLetterMedia video, get recommended a clickbaity video about comic books: https://postimg.cc/QVkc7QwQ
Watching Colombo snippets, get recommended some celeb Net Worth trashy video: https://postimg.cc/grRNTL5j
Climate Town links to some unrelated video about Orlando amusement parks: https://postimg.cc/jW0zNMxh
These are way milder than I remember, btw.
Logged out, no weird recommendations:
So yeah, logged out doesn't have that 3rd obnoxious video, which is kind of interesting.
A number of YT'ers I follow have mentioned this is basically required now for any sort of rankings.
Search has become one of the most dysfunctional features in Google products. I am extremely annoyed that I am paying for YouTube Premium, I might just pull the plug and install a network-wide ad blocker system so I can vote with my wallet.
God, I hate modern Google.
Something similar happens on Twitter when you search for something in the "Top" tab. It doesn't show you results with your search terms. Instead, it shows something peripherally related to what you searched, but much more popular and engaging.
Youtube is starting to become more like television, or Netflix.
On YouTube, you get thrown in a trash bin unless you're able to pay or generate traffic from popularity elsewhere.
YT also puts too much emphasis on post titles now, many posters outright clone titles, which in turn botches search results massively. It was a terrible decision YT made to deprioritize taxonomy (hash tags) years ago in order to reduce moderation staff-- Of which, if taxonomy actually worked, feedback could better identify inaccurate and mis-leading content when compared to thumbs down rates... The options for video result sorting have been terribly limited and almost useless as well for ages now.
A big conflict of interest is that YouTube sells and promotes ad-based content boosting to creators, which contradicting-ly makes them more geared towards promoting content that falls under this (paid promotional) category first. It also drives YouTube to lower organic reach for users to drive them towards paying for promotion more year over year... That also encourages the platform to subvert organically good/upvoted content. YT can't logically sell the idea that organic growth is a possibility any more citing the underlying fact that they feature paid promotion without labeling every promoted item of that content as such, it's shocking how they get away with this contradiction of authenticity regularly.
The older engagement methods were far better for YouTube's content quality and authenticity. Now too many users are driven to post repetitive and dragged out videos, with titles based on trends, with decreasing originality and substance.
The current YouTube/TikTok success model is training everyone to conform to a single theme and format, encouraging idea, topic, and content cloning, and into repeating and simply reacting to what popular channels do.
YouTube content will all only continue to get worse and more monotonous if the same ideals on paid promotion continue, and creator success/profit will continue to shrink. (Just my opinion of course).
I've been flagging these things as "not interested" for months now, but it feels like fighting windmills because it has no discernible effect. The effect of all of this is that YouTube is a lot less useful to me than it used to be.
I don’t know what they’re optimizing for but it certainly isn’t my enjoyment.
Gross.
I had to install an extension to get it to stop because "Not Interested" and "Don't Recommend Channel" don't work in search results, even though they are turning search results into just another front page :/
I basically use YouTube only without logging in, and rely a lot on the front page for my current interests (channels I want to remember long-term go in my RSS reader). It seems like YouTube always has a channel or two it insists on pushing repeatedly no matter how often I ignore their videos.
Too interesting, too holy shit wow can't believe that, wow. Like sometimes an EE thing yes, then it makes sense, basically a guy talking about an oscilloscope or television then it's part of the show to use a television to talk about it. And only when they link to it externally.
But interesting for its own sake? Rather talk to the men on the street, those guys are interesting, have great stories.
Would be nice for us to have a little more control and transparency over where the AI is taking us, though, specially for us YouTube Premium payers.
They might have a minus sign somewhere it shouldn't be.
-Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
youtube.com###hover-overlays
youtube.com##yt-icon.ytd-badge-supported-renderer
youtube.com###related
youtube.com###donation-shelfSearching for an 'unperson' will always return zero results nowadays. Edit: I guess that is just for Facebook now but my point stands. The results for certain searches are manipulated manually whether easily noticeable or not.
This. There's a lot youtubers from my country who has crap content presented in a cringey way.
Like, if I search for "second order vibrations in internal combustion engine", I get hundreds of people explaining it in local languages I don't even speak, in a way that's targeted at college students cramming for finals (think equations on a notepad without explaining what physically goes on).
Makes me wanna leave this place. That would be funny, isn't it? Emigrating because local YouTube content is cringe.
(I turned off all tracking things that can be turned off from their UI, but I suppose they can still figure out where I'm from unless I use a VPN).
Feels like they really want you to subscribe and engage with the "related" videos instead of the real deal, which sucks for channel owners, especially if it's channels who profit on being weirdly intrusive and hostile towards said channels or people.
youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/For you/)
youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/New for you/)
youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/People also watched/)
youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/Previously watched/)
youtube.com##ytd-horizontal-card-list-renderer:has-text(/People also search for/)Might be related to some local law or simply pressure from lawmakers, eg Canada is experimenting with such a law: https://www.medianama.com/2022/06/223-canada-bill-streaming-...
Google in general is annoyingly insistent in localizing results. It used to be that google.com gave you english results and you would go to google.ccTLD to get a local experience. Then they changed it to google.com being localized by default (even though my browser is set to english) but you could click a link to go back to the english version from the home page. Now they even hide that link when you go the the home page via the google logo (why????) and you have to explicitly go to google.com/ without a hl query parameter. And of course the english results are still localized somewhat (e.g. it'll show the local Wikipedia anlong with the english one, even for articles that have fuck all to do with location).
(I seeming can't completely disable that annoying "feature")
When people use highly complex graphical browsers and Javascript to make these requests it is sometimes triggered by a "button" at the bottom of a page called "more results" or something similar. Alternatively the requests may be triggered automatically when down scrolling, producing what some people call an "inifinite scroll" effect. Javascript is usually what produces the annoyances people experience. It is also used for tracking and telemetry.
The token for the public API to retrieve the next batch of results is the results file. Using a simpler HTTP client, I can (a) search YouTube very quickly and comprehensively entirely from the command line, (b) download videos without ever visiting a YouTube page in a graphical browser and being exposed to annoyances, tracking and telemetry (c) switch from retrieving via search string to retrieving via channel name, (d) mix the search and channel results into a single results file, (e) output a TSV table from the results file. Currently I include the following fields in the TSV table:
YouTubeID Title ChannelName Duration SearchString/ChannelPath Search/Channel
The last field is just an indicator of whether the result is from a search or a channel.
Videos are browsed and selected using a TSV table instead of an HTML search results page.^1 Because I am interested in videos of a certain duration, including "unpopular" videos with low view counts, I have found this is an optimal search method. No distractions. YouTube wants people to view popular, low quality, "viral" videos, e.g., "fake news", extremism and the like, because this "content" is optimal for their advertising business model. Hence automatic "recommendations". This is what makes YouTube search so horrible. Advertising as a "business model" for websites can influence design and have very harmful downstream effects.
1. The HTML pages for videos are where the "recommendations" come from. Thus I never see the recommendations as they are not part of this search/retrieval method. I could extract them from the HTML into a table if I wanted to see them, but I choose not to. I only extract the video download URLs from the pages for the videos.
This, but with LinkedIn and jobs
- [ ] ENH,SCH: https://schema.org/MediaObject and search cards
- [ ] UBY: search: transcript search snippets
Lately I've been learning to play traditional Irish music. Often I'll want to hear as many versions of a tune as I can; don't care if it's studio musicians, a session at a bar, or a few mates in their kitchen, as long as it includes the specified tune.
What will often happen if I search, for example, "Monaghan Jig," is that I'll get a few results from famous albums and professional YouTube content creators, then a bunch of other jigs, The Hag At The Churn, Lark in The Morning etc. and they'll drown out videos with the actual jig I want.
After that I have to experiment with variations like, "Monaghan Jig concertina," "Monaghan Jig pub session" etc to find the other videos YouTube's search had dismissed for me that indeed included "Monaghan Jig" in both the title and the content.
With this operator I can hopefully save myself a lot of guesswork and frustration.
I half suspect that this is a mistake and youtube will correct it quickly once word spreads.
*Also a premium subscriber. Youtube in many ways is a necessary part of this version of the internet experience and I detest having to sit through all the ads...if I have to pay $10/month seems fair to me. Just my 02 cents.
But the use case I have, that seems to consistently work poorly, is when I'm looking for all videos that contain a certain person and search by name. In these cases, YouTube shows you the top few results (which are typically the most viewed clips that match the query), then it shows you "related" videos (which typically don't contain that person at all), then it shows you videos that you have previously watched (I don't understand why). Eventually, if you keep scrolling down, you get another few batches of results ranked in the same way and potentially you might get all the relevant results. It's just quite hard to do so.
https://seosly.com/youtube-search-operators/
Date operators:
before:[date]
after:[date]
[search term], today
[search term], last hour
[search term], this month
[search term], this year
tesla, before:2019-01-02, after:2019-01-01
Edit: I'm not sure how intuitive the operators are. Ex: Combining them doesn't seem to give the expected results.
I experienced the same thing when looking for a definitive list of voice commands for Android auto.
In the old days we carried around pocket sized cards with the full set of all possible instructions/ parameters.
These days you have to search on Google, and then look at whichever ad-ridden hellhole has played the SEO game most effectively. That might have the answers, or it might be stale since it was originally copied and pasted from some other site long ago.
Why doesn't YouTube provide this information themselves?
need to use plus "+"
tesla, before:2019-01-02 + after:2019-01-01
i came across another site that had a few more, https://granwehr.com/blog/youtube-search-operators#15-advanc...
I've also tried the 'sort by oldest' programmed Google search that was posted here,[1] but its index seems to be missing many pages—youtube videos with few views in particular—compared to general Google.
To me it seems like there’s some mid-to-low hanging fruit there. YT’s recommender fails to understand when a video is part of a series so often I almost have to think it’s intentional. Also recommending videos I’ve already watched in my homepage feed? What?
What bugs me the most is that it wasn’t always this bad. Somebody changed it a couple of years ago.
source: My YouTube API key was blocked for this sort of thing shortly after GDPR came into effect
Unfortunately it does not improve the search results either, because AFAIK it only proxies them from YT itself.
For the query "monkeypox gym" I'm getting COVID-19 results.
For the query "social network without kids" I'm getting results for social networks aimed at kids.
For the query "cakes without strawberries" I'm getting... This: https://imgur.com/a/Os1kkcP
"cakes -strawberries"
Eg, "js without transpilation" gives quality results, but often times, especially when it's dealing with more popular search queries, it just kinda focuses on the keywords without any context.
For the search "social media without kids" I was actually looking for some articles that would focus on how the content changes depending on the age group. Or articles about social media focused on "adult things" like HN.
What I got was https://imgur.com/a/0tt8g4r
And I won't even get started on the blog spam content aggregate sites which seem to be over half of the results.
Google seriously needs to find a way out of this mess.
Basically, you can find (likely organic) discussion of topics by groups who are familiar with the subject and are likely to quickly correct any incorrect or misleading statements.
Otherwise, Google will believe that some no-name site with generated content is... somehow... a good search result. The 'reddit' approach works poorly for me recently, Google gets stuck in certain sub-reddits and there's a lot of low quality or bot content on reddit to filter out anyway.
Doesn't appear to given the permissions listed:
"Access your data for www.youtube.com"
Extension [1] gives a little 'X' beside the channel name in home and search, that can be used to completely remove that channel from all future searches.
Similarly, remove a bunch of random distracting crap[2] such as 'related results'.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-clean...
[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
attaching a prehung door
and
intitle: attaching a prehung door
and the results are identical (for me at least). The results are also extremely relevant and concise in showing me how to install a prehung door. I am not really sure what people mean. Are people asking youtube to find videos that don't exist? like "how to make tritan plastic"
Meanwhile, the products which HN promotes regularly like Mastodon and PeerTube fail to find things with directly searching the title text because P2P search is completely non functional.
Results get exponentially worse the more pages in you go. By page 3 the only results are ISP's. Basically if it isn't on page 1, it's just padding almost totally unrelated to what you were looking for.
Anecdotally, I absolutely love youtube search.
E.g.:
intitle:door
intitle:"prehung door"
So to have it search for all words in the title, you'd have to do a search for:
intitle:attaching intitle:a intitle:prehung intitle:door allintitle: attaching a prehung door
Engines supporting parentheses like Reddit's or Elasticsearch prevail here:
title:(attaching a prehung door)
Maybe it really depends on what you're searching for. But I also rarely see many irrelevant results, including for this search.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630286
(What is it?? :P)
I’ve seen it recommend related videos as soon as the video starts playing. It will recommend videos as soon as you click pause. There will be little interstitial recommendation overlays as it plays. How desperate must product managers at YouTube be to push this so strongly?
Thankfully I crafted some filters to hide all of this, but it’s so user hostile that I feel bad for anyone that doesn’t know how to get rid of all this noise.
These days, the press sometimes – though still not often – mentions her name.
I think they have been able to strike a really good balance between the use cases of directed searching and undirected consumption.
[Punycode] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
[IDN] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
Modern Browsers sanitize punycode, not so sure about bespoke browsers that live inside other mobile apps
For this, I've recently discovered the Chrome extension SponsorBlock[1], which relies on user-submitted segments to auto-skip all kinds of off-topic segments in the video. You can choose to keep, skip, or mute segments like intros, sponsor promo, subscription reminders, and more. This metadata is not available on every single video, but in my experience it has made a huge difference in the amount of ads and repetitive reminders I see. Many videos get segment updates very quickly.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
I easily watch 10 to 15 hours or more of video on YouTube each month, probably per week.
Plus YouTube Music makes it the best value streaming service I pay for.
(Not affiliated with brave at all, just really impressed by their search engine)
It is totally broken for me.
A lot of search queries give 90% of the results from 2 or 3 channels. If that is not the case, the results return almost the exact same results as what I got a few months back even though I know there is a ton of new content.
Youtube seems to put me in a box and there is no way out. I had to ditch youtube for spotify to get new music. Youtube seems to have become unusable unless you know the exact channel or video you want to watch.
Is there somebody who scrapes them youtube and sells the data
- subscribe through RSS only
- block all 'related videos' boxes with the picker tool from ublock
I also recommend Distraction Free YouTube for blocking recommendations and (optionally) comments.
also the ability to search videos that is under a specific view count or likes that has bee uploaded between specific date ranges.
https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/cyber-security-tutoria...
Search Engine - "Google Dorking" like inurl: intitle: intext: etc.
Also, google dorking has its "darkweb" side in forensics too. Enjoy.