YouTube's search function is atrocious now [video] | Hacker News Reader

YouTube's search function is atrocious now [video]

youtube.com

145 pointsnwj85 comments

Life hack, maybe it will help someone out: Add a "before:YYYY" to the search to go back to a simpler time.

Eg, "before:2012 python talk"

As an experiment open two tabs and compare the results of "python talk" and "before:2012 python talk". The difference is staggering.

This is amazing!

I bet there are already tickets in google-JIRA to break this functionality :(

We'll probably all need to start adding "before:2023" to all our search queries when the deluge of AI-generated content crowds everything else out.

there was tons of BS content, often digitally created, before 2023. the difference is 40% (then) vs 95% (potentially, soon)

My only complaint about this is that so much of the old stuff has been removed, privated, marked as age restricted, blurred due to refusal to be marked as "for kids"[1] and removing the comment section, or otherwise made inaccessible by their authors. The reason usually being that it's embarassing or otherwise doesn't reflect the uploader's modern persona. A lot of awesome content is missing from the results due to that, and that thought alone makes me sad when I use this feature...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viTkj0eu-fk

People should be allowed to remove their persona from the internet.

Yes, but that doesn't make it less of a shame when people remove content thousands of people enjoy.

Information that goes on the internet never truly goes away, be it through personal archive sites or more general ones like archive.org (which archives youtube.com directly), it just becomes harder to find unless specifically sought for.

The knowledge that I'm most certainly missing something when doing dated searches, and I'm viewing results filtered by people's current-day hindsight, instead of the unfiltered essence of the youtube of yesteryear makes me sad. We lost a lot of authenticity in the pursuit of flawless public images.

The way YouTube doesn't show you the metadata for removed videos anymore is infuriating. You end up with playlists where you can tell something was removed but not what.

That is a good tip. Many people doing this will run into another silent youtube change, which is higher resolution options for older videos are completely removed. Some videos I have in my saved playlists marked 'HD 1080p' now only have a maximum resolution of 240p. Very sad.

That seems unusual, post some examples?

Welp, it's way past time I backed up my favourite videos. Thanks for the warning.

Thanks a lot!

Also, 'sort by upload date' kills all the non directly keyword related results.

You can also do before:2030 (or some other date in the future). It shouldn't change the results except removing the "recommended" garbage. It's crazy how much more usable it becomes. You could probably write a Userscript or something to automatically add it to every query.

YT search results also show results that have literally nothing to do with the query. Stop showing me videos I watched previously when I'm literally in the midst of trying to find something specific.

It happens to me frequently that I want to find a video I watched previously but didn't bookmark. If they hid all the videos I've watched before I'd never find them.

No, like, the search will sometimes deliberately insert a couple of videos from your watch history in a section labeled "Previously watched". It's not just that it's surfacing previously seen videos which match the search; it's surfacing videos from your viewing history instead of videos which match your search.

That's not what they're referring to. It will show videos completely unrelated to your search query.

A few moments ago I searched for "Porter Robinson Ludwig" to continue watching a 2 hour stream where Porter Robinson guides Ludwig through making a beat. The 6th result in my search list is a video I've watched before, "Pro Players Play 50€ decks" from a Magic The Gathering channel. Nothing to do with Porter Robinson or Ludwig or music. It's just there's because I've watched it once before.

If I type in the search query of "games that think more gameplay mechanics equals more fun" after just a few videos, the videos in search switch to being completely unrelated and are labeled either "You might also like this", or "Previously Watched". Hilariously, "Porter Robinson (Teaches Ludwig How to Produce Music)" is video is #6. #7 is "Streamer Fakes Blindfold Speedrun for Clout". The video by ProZD with that exact title does not appear in the first 30 results, and that's when I quit counting.

For me it very frequently loads good results, then reloads the results again but with much worse/completely irrelevant results, and I see the original results only for a split second.

It also doesn't do that second load when I f5/enter the url directly.

There's a userscript that can 'mask' AND hide previously watched vids -- try 'youtube-hide-watched' by EvHaus - https://github.com/EvHaus/youtube-hide-watched

This 100%. It’s so infuriating trying to browse search results but not even halfway down the page it just assumes that I have the attention span of a goldfish and that I would rather look at their list of recommendations for videos to watch that have absolutely nothing to do with my search query.

Good grief the people in charge of YouTube and Google have put their products in complete free fall because that’s the only way they can see a non-zero velocity.

I recently searched for a homey cooking recipe and YouTube pulled up a video titled something like 'Tearful father says goodbye to daughter before gang assassination', with a correspondingly horrifying thumbnail.

I responded by logging out, deleting the cookies for my YouTube container, and adding the YouTube domain to my adblock. My use of YouTube is now restricted to RSS feeds for channels I like, redirected to an Invidious or Piped instance. Highly recommended.

I very strongly believe this sort of thing is why there's been such an anxiety epidemic.

It really does need attention urgently because it's turning people into nervous wrecks, and they don't seem able to stop themselves.

> 'Tearful father says goodbye to daughter before gang assassination'

I’ve had this one suggested to me multiple times as well for completely unrelated content. It’s not the kind of thing that I watch or would click on even out of curiosity, but YouTube really thinks I should watch it for some reason.

same. i even reported the video but it appears to be perennial

The comical thing to me is when I search, I can't even find the video in question.

The UX for google products has gotten so much worse.

I've had problems with youtube search recently, but because I use google more often it's so much more obvious with google search.

Like I hate how they have that bar that keeps changing different search modes, before 'images', 'videos' used to be in a fixed position, now I have to go searching for it in a soup of unrelated words like 'Finance', 'Flights', etc.

> The UX for google products has gotten so much worse.

In my experience the UX for google products has been an absolute dumpster fire for many years. I switched to DDG half a decade ago because I literally kept tapping/clicking on the wrong things constantly in the Google search interface. In other words it was so bad that I decided to switch even before the latest drop in the quality of search results, purely because of the UX.

IMO Android UX is pretty great, for a personal computing device. YouTube's UX is also pretty great, for an ad delivery network. It succeeds at showing you ads.

YouTube doesn't really care if the search function gives you the right or wrong search result. Totally irrelevant as long as you click something, anything and your eyeballs are on the next ad. YouTube is optimised for keeping you watching ... literally anything... as long as they can play you some ads, preferably expensive ads.

That's also why Google doesn't leverage YouTube to its true potential. YouTube has the lowest revenue per user of all the video platforms and this is the reason why.

And trying to increase its usability and profitability outside of ads would affect negatively Google's overall business.

One particularly annoying "you had ONE JOB" thing: automatic captions aren't consistently searched either via the Youtube search or via the main Google product.

For instance, searching for the double-quoted string "bears don't like it when you solve" verbatim gives zero results, but that's exactly the transcript for 8:14 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1G9vIyNL20&t=491s

Particularly frustrating when I remember a random snippet or phrase from a video but not the _title_

The most frustrating thing about youtube is how it's not smart enough to figure out that I want to watch "XX Part 55" after watching "XX Part 54". It just gives me random other videos on autoplay.

Absolutely -- this seriously seems like it should have been fixed years ago.

And it's not like you need fancy AI to do it. Just a handful of simple heuristics.

It was already working years ago and they deliberately broke it

Are you sure? I've been watching YouTube basically since it launched and I don't ever remember it consistently getting that right.

They've been inserting suggested videos into the results lately. So, your search for C++ tutorials now also yields clusters of "This one weird trick to turning him on" videos in the results.

> "This one weird trick to turning him on"

C# ;)

I wonder if a distributed attempt to build a complementary index for YouTube could be an answer; wherein users install a browser plugin that captures the results and metadata of a given query or metadata when a video is watched.

This would amount to doing free labor to prop up a trillion dollar company’s subpar product. Then again, YouTube is only barely profitable as-is right? And getting people to switch to a more sustainable paid alternative is a non-starter. So maybe this is the future we deserve

> free labor to prop up a trillion dollar company’s subpar product

This presumes you're doing the trillion dollar company a favor, but an independent index isn't likely to align with YT's engagement goals.

Nobody that would consider using such an index would be browsing YouTube without an ad blocker.

Free labour is how I was downloading YT videos to my unsupported Windows Phone device in 2011.

Surely most search engines would have indexed most videos at this point?

You could run classifiers against the video but $$$

NewPipe search just works perfectly. I gave up searching anything on youtube.

So right on par with their Google search results. They no longer care about accuracy and only care about ad revenue.

I'd argue youtube's search is far worse, given it intentionally includes entire sections of results (and toward the very top of results) that are categorically off-topic, presumably with the intention of distracting the user into spending more time on the platform, and they can't be turned off (I tried some uBlock filters but they're hit and miss). I think distracting ads in Google results are a necessary evil (i.e. ads are distracting, but it's hard/impossible to show ads without them being distracting, unlike those undesirable sections in youtube search results).

So this doesn't even seem like an issue with search "quality" in a product sense -- it seems like something is actually deeply broken with YouTube search. This is a straight-up bug.

For those not watching the video, he's searching for "games that think more gameplay mechanics equals more fun" (not in quotes) which you can see the results of:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=games+that+thin...

He expects it to list his video with that title:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZKcZbi1rg

But that video... just isn't in the search results at all. I thought -- maybe it's an obscure video? Maybe the others are just way more popular? But no -- his video has 15 million views. While the search results have some homage or re-uploads with 575K, 1.4K, 739 views... so the fact that it's missing his original video means it's just broken. Yikes.

Note that it does finds the video as the #1 result if you search only within his channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@ProZD/search?query=games%20that%20t...

But the point is, this isn't some kind of "product decision" affecting the ranking. This isn't about prioritizing money over niche content or something.

This is just an instance where YouTube search is just flat-out broken. There's a serious bug here -- the questions are, how widespread is it, and why isn't Google finding it and patching it before we figure it out? It seems like a serious problem with quality control.

Its not a bug, its a choice. I remember this happened just after a big terrorist/insane person shooter attack. There was a graphic video from the shooting circulating on YT and instead of removing this clip and filtering uploads YT/Google decided to break search instead.

It might have been Christchurch mosque shooting videos.

I know this doesn't solve the issue but the browser plugin "unhook" is a nice quality of life improvement. I turn off homepage, autoplay, recommendations and have it take me strait to my subs when I type youtube.com.

I've put Firefox in recovery node (no extensions) and forgot it that way. Seeing YouTube without Unhook was an assault on the senses. I sometimes forget how bad the default web browsing experience is.

For others, Unhook lets you hide elements of the YouTube experience, and even replace your home page with just your subscriptions.

Everytime I use youtube search now I'm getting disgusting, sexualized recs when I search for a specific topic that is completely unrelated to that crap. I cannot even block these recommendations from the search result list, I cannot block these channels.

Youtube/Google have simply become insane. You're at work, looking for some Youtube coding tutorial, and you get some video with a sexual thumbnail, or something about a disgusting ear disease or something. What the hell Google? Shouldn't these video be marked as sexual/NSFW content at first place?

Deleting youtube view history and turning it off used to fix these things, but not anymore, it doesn't make any difference. I've never seen that, a mainstream, non tabloid, website that forces its user to see sexualized or disgusting content.

Youtube employees here, do you really believe it makes people more likely to watch youtube videos? It doesnt.

I don't want to see "other viewers have also watched these", I don't want to see "for you". I only want to see what is relevant to the query I just made.

Isn't it ironic? Google beat Altavista back in the days because Google search results were more accurate than the competition. But now that Google is basically a monopoly in search, it simply decided to forego its core value for profit and display the user garbage results, results Google think the user might be interested in regardless of the search query, and not results the user explicitly searched for. This isn't a search engine anymore, this is a recommendation engine...

Quite likely that someone on your wifi, or someone with whom you share videos, is clicking on those. The algo gives you recommendations from other people.

If you have a 12 year old kid in the house then uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

you get what you pay for, right folks? surely with a youtube premium account you get the premium search experience.

Unfortunately no, I paid for premium for a while believing this, but the experience is exactly the same.

Though it's very possible I'm just missing the sarcasm here.

Very possible

No, you don't. You get the same search experience as non-paying people. Premium just gets you out of Google's ads.

I am paying for premium and with each month yt experience is worse and worse

Maybe they outsourced the search algorithm and now use Amazon’s product search algorithm for YouTube.

This!

Both Amazon search and trying to workaround it's problems by using it's "categories" are frustrating experiences.

It also extra annoying that sometimes you do get, and other times you don't get a link to category specific product you're looking at belongs.

And as soon as you sort/filter reaults it goes from bad to even worse.

Don't forget the obligatory "People also watched" section jammed into the middle of the search results which deliberately shows a screen full of things you didn't search for, that are at best tenuously related. Emphasis on at best because they're often not related at all. Who wants this?

Worse yet: there's also a "previously watched" section, which - as far as I can tell - ignores your search query entirely and just spits out a few videos from your watch history.

I'm at least spared from that because I turned off YouTubes watch history completely. I find it's better behaved that way because the related videos section just shows videos similar to the one I'm watching, rather than trying to "learn" my interests and invariably getting it completely wrong.

Amusingly if you turn off the watch history then the frontpage passive aggressively refuses to show you anything, rather than falling back to showing your subscriptions, which you still have to click through to a separate page to see.

I finally turned on the watch history because the suggestions without it were so far out. It used to be that you'd watch a video or two and then suggestions would get really good, even without history being enabled but at some point it switched to just recommending popular junk instead of trying to curate things based on the last couple of videos you'd watch.

I think it's funny how vague and redundant that label is. "People also watched this video". Yes, youtube.... it has a viewcount of 145k views, I would presume that viewcount comes from people watching it.

> Who wants this?

Who wants the “Related articles” after the first paragraph in every single news article? Who wants the endless garbage links below the “Click to expand” button? Who wants to scroll past “Top picks in your neighbourhood”, “Offers near you”, “New on Deliveroo”, “Most favourited places”, “Meal deals”, “Top rated” and “Fastest delivery” (yes, ALL 7 of them) before you even get to the actual search results on Deliveroo? I really don’t know. And it terrifies me that I don’t know.

youtube needs a competitor. i hate their products, i hate youtube music more. but i can't use something else.

YouTube has competitors, but none of them are very serious about the job. They're just kind of vibing in slightly-adjacent niches, afraid to take a bite at the top dog.

I'm not sure it's afraid but more the resources required to make it successful.

Bandwidth isn't cheap, storage is a bucket load and than moderation & copyright. Let alone any other issues.

Depends on what your goal is. If you're trying to make a competitor to YouTube's original idea, bandwidth and storage are likely distant concerns, and copyright isn't a hard problem (because you can just accept DMCA requests like the rest of the world, you don't need to replicate contentID).

If you want Despacito and the Baby Shark Dance to be your top videos, it gets a lot harder.

https://joinpeertube.org/

everytime a yt competitor comes out it sucks worse

Now? It's been horrible for a while. And this being an election year, the search result is littered with political news and garbage that has nothing to do with what is being searched for.

ProZD's skits are awesome. It's really insulting that some of his original videos are ranked lower than "reuploads" when he doesn't even take them down to begin with.

Has anyone tried to make a Yahoo! Directory vision of YouTube/web video?

This isn’t going to get better on behalf of YT product teams, and Sora et al are going to ratchet up the stakes

Yeah, I was thinking along the same lines, something like a searchable db with links to youtube. But I discovered invidio.us which returns good search results, for now at least.

You know what else bothers me. If I hover over a thumbnail for a video, that now counts as a view and gets added to my history. Clogging up my feed with more algorithmic horseshit I don't want to watch. I'm thinking of just using nebula because I mostly watch science videos and I'm tired of the algo inserting shit I'm not the least bit interested in.

Just scrolling the frontpage on youtube mobile adds stuff randomly to your watch history, it seems to count anything you linger on - however briefly - as a 'watch'

Needless to say ten minutes of absentmindedly scrolling ruins your suggested results for a long time

The worst offender is YouTube mobile page search. You cannot provide filters there at all.

I use my own RSS reader for YouTube. Then I search RSS feeds for anything useful.

I was just reading this earlier today!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Also, if you use an Ad blocker, the buttons on the search results page [sort by, etc.] Stop working

I use an Ad Blocker and I pay for YouTube Premium. My experience doesn't seem to degrade.

That's possibly the best filter comment you could have written.

Then there's something wrong with your ad blocker. Works fine for me with uBlock Origin's default filters.

'Now'??!? Youtube's search has been literally broken for more than a year, several of us mentioned this on HN months ago.

e.g. Y-search used to honor the operators like 'intitle:' and `|` like G-search, but that functionality is long gone. I'm not even convinced '-' works anymore.

Nothing's gonna save their query system except Google's backend engineers. Good luck waiting for that.

---

Until then I highly recommend using userscripts/addons to bring some sanity back to using the platform:

'Block Youtube Users' : "hides videos of users/channels from home, search, related, and comments"

https://greasyfork.org/scripts/11057-block-youtube-users

~~ My favorite! It's like GHHbD[0] but from within Youtube.

[0] http://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/

---

'YouTube: Hide Watched Videos' by EvHaus : 'mask or hide visibility of watched videos and shorts'

https://github.com/EvHaus/youtube-hide-watched

---

'Return WATCHED badge on Youtube (with custom text)' by q1k : "Brings back the WATCHED overlay to the videos you have already watched"

https://greasyfork.org/scripts/419722-return-watched-badge-o...

---

'YouTube Clickbait-Buster' by hjk789 : "Check whether it's worth watching a video before actually clicking on it, by 'peeking' its visual or verbal content, description, comments, viewing the thumbnail in full-size and displaying the full title"

https://github.com/hjk789/Userscripts/tree/master/YouTube-Cl...

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'Youtube Scrollable Right Side Description' by sh3ll : "Description is moved on the right, expanded and scrollable (and a view-count is put under the player)" {FYI: if you use a white or light theme on YT, go into the script and change the view-count text to something dark}

https://greasyfork.org/scripts/452405-youtube-scrollable-rig...

---

'Make "Videos" the default tab on Youtube channels', a contrib by Scriptchansky

https://greasyfork.org/en/discussions/requests/56798#comment...

"Now"?!?!? It's even more buggy than Windows search.

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