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> But making a video takes time and effort, so has a much higher barrier to use as a click farm.

> The mainstream channels aren't all that useful, but there's a ton of "old web" style videos (some even recent) passionately providing details for almost anything you'd think to search. And they're a gold mine.

This won't be the case for long. YT is already starting to be polluted with spam and AI generated content, which will get more and more common. The same thing that happened to the web in text form, will happen to videos.

I think the only solutions are using allowlists for specific domains, and ironically enough more AI to filter specific results. Or just straight up LLMs instead of web search, assuming they're not trained on spam data themselves.

Yeah. I was recently looking for videos comparing two smartphones and among top ranked videos there were videos that just show the phones side by side and the video consists of showing specs side by side and videos that just have LLM-generated text, added to the video with TTS.

One critical difference is the date attached to youtube videos. It's easy to verify that a video was made before this tech was available, but you can't do that with websites, or search engine result pages.

It does limit utility for more modern needs, unfortunately.

Note that the problem of filtering bad data out of learning material isn’t inherently easier than filtering same out of search results.

Would a browser feature that skipped to the relevant parts of the video based on closed captioning and understanding search intent be useful? It seems like this would be a good way for Google to fight to stay relevant in UX vs having the chat bots just quickly spitting out a readable answer. Hunting through ad laden webpages is annoying. Seeking to the relevant section of the video is a solvable problem, especially for videos above some viewership threshold.

I've definitely seen Google do this already: https://searchengineland.com/google-tests-suggested-clip-sea...

Google seems to be taking much more advantage of YouTube's transcription feature lately. The first addition was the (ok, gimmicky) animation on the Subscribe button when someone says the dreaded like. Hopefully a sign of things to come.

Overall AI summaries are very welcome for a certain subset of YouTube which is sadly dominated by sponsored, clickbait, and ad-driven content.

Didn’t Google try this already? It seems useful to me, at least. IMO the next frontier of search is not better hypertext, it’s podcasts, audio, and video.

> Seeking to the relevant section of the video is a solvable problem

...and it has already been solved, though partially: SponsorBlock allows people to add a "Highlight" section to a video, which denotes the part of the video which the user most likely wanted to see (sans the "what's up guys", "like and subscribe", etc.)

Of course, it's not perfect: it relies upon humans doing the work, though some may see that as a positive over something more computerized.

Do you have some tips for finding concise videos that answer the question you are asking? I am finding more and more obvious LLM bullshit in results, so I am willing to try some other tactics. But I am not ready to spend the minutes watching videos to see if it is actually relevant or a waste of time, always artificially long to increase ad revenue.

For me, it really depends on the type of video. For fixing cars, I'm usually looking for something specific enough that there isn't a lot of chaff. It was probably recorded and edited on a phone just to splice the clips together. Probably the default thumbnail that youtube extracted from the video.

For product videos, if Project Farm did it, look there first. Otherwise, I look for someone has a lot of videos for competing products with basically the same format, not over 10 minutes.

Tech videos are the hardest, I often still prefer text. Maybe look for links to the docs in the description? I still get duds though.

I don’t know much about fixing cars, but yeah, YouTube is a treasure trove for tacit knowledge.

Wish I did, but here you're at the algorithm's mercy, unfortunately. One possibility is subbing/accruing watch time on channels that you find provide you the right value, so that the algorithm might recommend similar channels on other subject matters.

That's curious, I generally hate video due to inability to glance over content, and the few attempts I made to actually find useful information I searched for resulted in... spammy extra low effort video content that did not answer my questions.

Depends on what you’re looking for. A blog post about how to play Search and Destroy by The Stooges is not as useful as a video of James Williamson himself showing you the riffs!

Well, I don't think I'd be able to learn much just from watching the concert: teaching is fundamentally different from doing.

So I think even that example does not universally hold. I'd still appreciate a write up with tips on what's important and if there are any transitions to focus on with only the bits on video where some of that is demonstrated.

Now, I can barely contort my fingers into one riff, so I lack the knowledge to understand what I am missing, but I'd still have a hard time learning that from video.

I’m not talking about concert footage, I’m talking about James breaking the song down and showing you the riffs at quarter speed.

Until a recent YouTube video I was playing the song incorrectly. It’s blazing fast and the mix is sort of insane so it’s very hard to hear exactly what is going on. And the tablature isn’t going to let you see how his body fits into the groove.

This is tacit knowledge we’re talking about, not book learning. Guitar instruction is always hands on.

Almost everything is hands-on (everything apart from things you really can't do hands-on, like exploring black holes): I don't remember seeing someone come out of reading a book on programming and being a master programmer.

But video is not hands-on any more so than text: if it was, live concerts and sports games and other performances would not be such a big deal. Sure, video is richer in some signals (audio/video), but poorer in others (introspection, pacing and focus...).

That does not mean I can't read to understand a new topic or to be prepared to look for subtleties in a hands-on performance.

If anything, to a great student, they should be complementary, but still, each student will have one or the other contribute more to their learning, and that depends both on the teacher, but also on the student.