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When I do a Google search in an Incognito tab for "how to download youtube videos", the first two results I get are the following.

- https://msunduziassociation.online/perfect-online-videos/

- https://gssaction.org/program-all-in-one-media-solutions/

I would certainly put those in the "Terrible" category like the author.

I get savefrom.net in both Incognito and normal tabs, uBlock or not. I have no idea why you get crap results that are somehow different. uBlock doesn't change google results in Firefox for me at all. It seems you get crap added, not removed.

I searched with Chrome, perhaps that's the difference. Firefox also blocks some ads out-of-the-box even without uBlock, so maybe it was already blocked.

It could also be related to targeting, like time zone, location, IP address, age group etc.

I get the same search result in Edge as in Firefox. Can't test in Chrome, but something seems strange.

savefrom.net is a crap result.

You seem to be missing the point of the discussion here, which was to compare results returned. Not to rate if one site is better than another.

My top 2 (incognito) are blog posts from pcmag.com and zdnet.com listing 5 ways to download YT videos. Maybe it's blogspam, but the listed services seem valid at first glance.

savefrom.net is the 5th result (2nd page underneath 5 youtube videos)

Edit: This is from the US. If i had to guess, these are regional differences. What country are you in?

I got similar to you; I'm in Australia.

Did you click either of those links?

Both seem to do the job of downloading a youtube link to mp4 for free.

Did you click either of those links? They are not YouTube video downloaders, they just link to another downloader. There is nowhere on those links to even put a YouTube URL.

Are you seriously suggesting that a website with the following "About us" with only a link to another YouTube video downloader is itself a good YouTube video downloader?

> Good Samaritan Support Action is to reawaken the Body of Christ to receiving the extravagant love of The Father, as well as our call to respond to this love by loving God with all of our hearts, souls, strengths, and minds. In order for people’s hearts to be linked to the heart of our Heavenly Father, we want to foster and facilitate the establishment of a culture of love in our churches and ministries.

so, there is one extra click... But for the user, the site does the job and takes an extra 1 second.

Ideal? No. But it does the trick.

Not GP, but navigating to an unrelated scammy site just having a link to the actual site is a terrible and unethical job by Google. Imagine if you search "youtube" and the top result is not YouTube but some scammy site just having a link to YouTube. It's not about click counts, if the youtube downloader has bad UX and requires extra clicks, it's a bit inconvenient but ok.

Those are both garbage/scam sites

I'm curious: what is the rationale for "in an incognito tab" being part of the test harness?

It seems pretty arbitrary to me to disable one of the key features - in this case personalization - of the software being evaluated.

Or is the evaluation not between "search engines" but rather "search engines without personalization"? If so, then this restriction does make sense. But that is not the evaluation that "normal users" are interested in.

> I'm curious: what is the rationale for "in an incognito tab" being part of the test harness?

It's the closest we can easily get to the 'average user experience'. Someone who has a long account/cookie history with Google has plausibly trained the site to return more relevant results through implicit user-curation of avoiding obvious-to-them SEO-spam on other queries.

If we posit that every user eventually trains Google to avoid SEO spam, then this begs the question of why Google(/Bing) don't eliminate the SEO spam in the first place.

Besides that, it's not obvious why search engine personalization should dramatically change the basic utility of search results. We should expect personalization to mostly address ambiguities: is 'the best way to set up tables' asking about furniture assembly/carpentry or SQL? None of the author's queries for this article supported such ambiguities, and besides that the results returned (see the final appendix) aren't[†] valid answers to a different interpretation of the question.

[†] -- I think I'd quibble about the 'adblock' question, since a reasonable person might still find an adblocker that works but participates in the 'acceptable ads program' to be sufficient.

> It's the closest we can easily get to the 'average user experience'

You wouldn’t be really taking the average here though would you? You would be capture the experience someone might have if they were in incognito, using google for the very first time, or using google on another device for the every first time, but not the “average experience”.

> It's the closest we can easily get to the 'average user experience'.

Maybe it's the closest we can get (though I doubt it), but it definitely isn't close enough to tell us anything about the "average user experience".

The average user has been using google for years, without taking any steps to avoid personalization. An incognito session (on a browser / machine / network that is probably fingerprinted...) is pretty much the opposite of that typical usage pattern.

I recognize that just writing a blog post or comment on HN is not a research project so needs to do something quick, but I think it mostly invalidates the experiment. What would get closer would be to devise a few user personas and attempt to search and browse for awhile within those personas before trying the experiment. Or much better yet, put together a focus group comprised of real people within the personas you're interested in, and run the experiment using their real accounts.

> If we posit that every user eventually trains Google to avoid SEO spam

I don't think it's that, I think it's that every user trains it to return results more likely to improve the metric of "more likely to click one of the links", and I think that makes it more, not less, likely that they see what most of us here consider to be spam.

But I don't know! Maybe that's not what this experimental setup would show. But it would be a lot more enlightening than a setup using a fresh incognito window, which reflects the usage pattern of a proportion of search queries that is a tiny rounding error above zero.

Why are you assuming all users are logged in to google all the time?

Google has billions of user accounts ....

Because it is objectively the case that the "average user" of the internet has a google cookie in their browser. It doesn't require that they be logged in - though I believe it's likely also the case that the "average user" is indeed logged into a google account - it just requires that they use google search without turning off cookies or specifically blocking google's. Essentially everybody uses google search and essentially nobody cares enough (or would know how) to turn off cookies or block google's cookie.

If this doesn't describe most people you know, you're in a very small bubble. (I'm somewhat in that bubble too, but I still have lots of family and friends who use the internet the normal way.)

Google gets paid when you click on an ad. It's reasonable to guess you're not going to click on too many scam software ads with your software engineer profile. So naturally you'll be showed less of them.

In this thread we can see people both using incognito tabs seeing different results, it will only become worse to compare if they are using personalized results.

cross-posted: Did you try using savefrom.net? You can type "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYVmtgxebU" into the text box and hit "Download". Then you'll get a new tab that tries to get you to install malware. If you decline to install it, the new tab takes you to the malware's homepage. If you close the tab and go back to the original tab, savefrom.net presents you with an error message saying "The download link not found." and does not help you download the video.

savefrom.net used to be good but it seems they've switched their MO. plenty of decent alternatives filled the gap though.

Can you name the alternatives, and are they present in the search results?

An adblocker is necessary, and IMO a script blocker as well. I feel vaguely like search has gotten worse over time, but it is not a huge problem—usually a good site is on the first page or two, and so I can just go check them out.

But if clicking a site meant I would be under attack, that really increases the stakes, I start to care strongly about the absence of bad sites, not just the existence of a good one.

Other than that, people need to be trained to not download programs from websites in general. I think this has gotten better over time? This is just a human mistake. Maybe Google could suppress sites that link to executables. It must, right?

It would suppress linking to malware executables, but just general programs I don't see why they would.

By the time you know enough about a site to download some random executable off it and run it, you know more than enough to just enter the URL, so there’s no point to having it show up in search results.

Put me in the camp of google and the rest are horrible for all but very specific/unique technical terms, ie weak neutral currents. Anything that is more "everyday life" is an exercise in futility sorting through trash, often without even the terms you are looking for. And good luck with "verbatim" searches - either ignored or zero results.

> they could make a different test

The takeaway I got from the article is everyone can make their own test, as opposed to relying on other people's sentiments and memes about X is bad or Y is good.

Trying to emulate a non-expert experience without workarounds is not the common usage pattern since everyone familiar with their favorite tools have ways to get more value out of them, but this article presents a way of constructing an experiment (this is why I chose these queries, this is how I ranked scams, etc.), and I think people should follow this same spirit to evaluate if they are stuck in a local optimum with their current choice of tools.

Yeah, author seems to heavily underestimate his own needs vs general needs. But for what Google et al know about me the results could indeed be more precise. I have developed a habit of appending “GitHub” in the search query for when I am actually looking for source code vs just trying to find a page that just downloads me a video.

I'm also in the same camp who think search results from Google is very good but ChatGPT based search with RAG is better, granted it's a paid version. The latter however is kind of experimental, personally would love to have another column on ChatGPT with RAG (Bing) and the fact the author ignored RAG is rather strange.

For those (like me) wondering what RAG means: “Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) represents a groundbreaking approach in information retrieval, where the accuracy of search results directly influences the quality of generated answers. In essence, RAG combines traditional search mechanisms with Large Language Model's ability to understand and generate answers.”

(https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-we-increased-search-accur....)

The topic of control (in ChatGPT like models) explained: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.11701.pdf

If you like Bing (ChatGPT with RAG), then also give perplexity.ai a try - similar concept, but IMO better executed.

https://www.perplexity.ai/