I type something in and it ignores the words and presents something it thinks I might like.
For good measure, it prepends a word-spaghetti advert that's optimised on-the-fly to maximise confusion with the missing useful search result. When I accidentally click on it then they'll get paid.
I think the problem is not malice nor stupidity.
Most youtube users are non-technical/layman people who don't really know what they want. They type "fun cat videos" or "minecraft" or whatever and want suggestions of popular things to see.
The technical people who know what they want are the minority so it's not profitable to create a separate search mode just for them, because they are tech-literate enough to figure out the idiosyncrasies.
Google. I want compensation for emotional damage. What is this crap? Those aren't even the worst recommendations in those results. IT GETS WORSE.
Unfortunately, nobody else seems to be doing much better. I've found that DuckDuckGo's results suddenly got drastically worse a few months ago: markedly fewer results overall, and the results that do show up have worse relevance (in particular, generic pages about the closest major city, e.g. its official homepage or Wikipedia article, tend to show up for no obvious reason).
I don't think Google is "terrible" at anything; they know their stuff. But they have created peverse incentives around advertising which lead to this.
They're paid by the advert clicks, so if you actually find a search result you're not clicking on an advert.
The definition of an advert is "I want to push something at you that's only indirectly relevant to what you are looking for, and I'm willing to pay for that" -- that's what an advert _is_.
In my simple brain, I'd happily see Google paid per-display (not click) of adverts. Then my incentives (to find a search result) have a fighting chance of aligning with theirs. Show me the advert, in a separate column marked "adverts".
But I appreciate this is a vast over-simplification their broader business.
Other search engines give me results that are useless most of the time, because they do not contain all my carefully chosen search terms.