I know it's silly but I sometimes feel anxiety at the prospect of that enormous bank of knowledge getting lost in some way or another (e.g. Google deciding it wants to do something else or some disaster).
It is truly invaluable to _humanity_
It is truly invaluable to _humanity_
The last things I can think of they did to ruin it is surfacing Shorts and "you may also like" results, but the results themselves were completely broken for many years now (my favourite is when doing a search within a channel, looking for e.g. "Let's play Factorio Episode 98" which will return episodes 97,98 and 101, but not 98 no matter how far you scroll down in the results. If you want to find episode 98, naturally you should search for episode 99 and then it will appear).
But what bothers me the most is that YouTube's data can't be fully indexed by search engines. Recently, I was trying to find the video of a comment I had a picture of, but it was impossible to find because comments aren't indexed at all. While Reddit's search also sucks for example, at least search engines can index Reddit's data and make it possible to search it.
Eventually I find it and I shake my head wondering how YouTube/Google could get this bad.
It’s not like Google search, where being the best at search is a meaningful competitive advantage and necessary for survival. If YouTube found a credible competitor, I strongly suspect they’d improve their search (from the users’ perspective).
Sometimes it feels like you're gaslighting yourself down a memory hole.