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Comment by VenezuelaFree | Hacker News Reader

Search is the reason I stopped watching youtube, I used to view and discover so many nice stuff in there, tutorials, new hobbies, new music, new creators with different interests, etc but now it's pretty much impossible to find, you are forced to watch the 3 top videos, some 3 ads and then it forces you to watch some other random unrelated crap, it's so annoying and frustrating

It got so bad that even searching the full tittle of the video doesnt show you that video haha

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What got me really mad is searching your own history. There's this "search watch history" on the https://www.youtube.com/feed/history

I remember watching video that contains certain word in the title. A minecraft contraption from a small channel (4 videos, 93 subs). I searched that word in the title. But youtube can't find it. Fortunately, I saved the world download that listed in the video with the name of the channel. So I searched the channel name + the word, it still can't find it.

So I searched only the channel name instead, in the search page. It works, and checking their videos, youtube mark one of them as watched. With the exact same title I searched. But it didn't show me in the history search. WTF youtube.

Youtube search is also weird in that it has a hard time finding something directly but will find it and put it it in the suggested videos feed after you have given up. 4 or 5 videos later. (shrugs) hell if I know.

But really, if I ever see a really good video I will download it. I try not to be too much of a digital horder, so it has to be really good. But their search has failed me enough times that it is worth it.

Google.com is a lot better at searching YouTube than YouTube is at searching YouTube

I prefer googling in duckduckgo

DDG was the best at searching videos until a year ago, idk what changed but know is worse than youtube search

Duckduck going?

no, googling

use the term, let trademark expire

Waddle-waddling

gemini @YouTube is decent too.

Amazon is the same now. I can't find books on it that I know for sure exist on it. It always pushes something else first.

Search by ISBN works as expected for books

thanks.

Perhaps this is due to Youtube's alternate titles or A/B/C testing scheme feature?

YT videos have a canonical title, but can have other one assigned randomly (as well as alternate thumbnails). If you're in the B group you might have gotten the B title, but search might only look through canonical titles?

I suspect YT-Search is broken by intention

There is no way that this billion company isnt/cant be able to build a working search for its video titles&texts.

>I remember watching video that contains certain word in the title

You could use youtube-dl to download the all automatic subtitles those videos and then search.

I seem to remember at one point there was a bug (or "bug") where watches wouldn't be tracked if you used an adblocker.

It doesn’t solve all the issues you mention, but YouTube Search Fixer [1] [2] is a browser extension that at least lets you remove irrelevant results, Shorts, live streams, and more from search. It makes results a bit more usable.

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with YouTube Search Fixer. I’m currently working on https://maxxmod.com, a YouTube-focused browser extension that will include search improvements, so I’ve researched the ecosystem.

[1] Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-suite...

[2] Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/search-fixer-for-yo...

Just read the description and OMG soo much crap, thank you so much for this. I guess when I filter these dopamine leeches in my mind I kind of lump them together

Wish I knew about this extension earlier.

YouTube search filter is godsend.

https://freetubeapp.io/

Advanced search works. Also auto-skipped sponsored content, thumbnails directly from video content, no google account to use it, subscribe works, no ads and many more...

FreeTube has been extremely slow with loading videos for me. Otherwise it's a killer app and I would use it if it was possible to connect my premium account login to it.

Surely they just want to avoid straining their database so they put some "performance hacks" into their database instructions that they Ab/B-tested to "work" for 90 percent of people or something.

Meanwhile they could have just returned the titles of all your videos you have ever watched as a list and let your computer do the heavey lifting by searching through that text on the frontend only to fetch thumbnails and such for the final matches. I have a webservice with a table of 4000 lines or more and I can search it quasi instantly on my smartphone with a simple Javascript script hooked up to an input field.

They want to push down you throat whatever their algo decides.

What sort of API do you use to search?

> forced to watch ... 3 ads

There are very efficient ways to block all ads, including YouTube ads. uBlock Origin browser extension is one of them. SponsorBlock browser extension would also skip over in-video ads.

And good luck if the video you're looking for was related to something featured in a news report. No, youtube, I am not searching for 100 different local TV news stories about a viral video, when I type in the title of that viral video.

on top of that it pushes worst creators (who are the biggest thanks to yt) content.

Search and recommendations is terrible. It’s a classic example of what’s wrong at Google.

I used to love watching recommended videos at the end of a video. They were always focused on some extension of the current video watched. Now it’s slop trying to peddle stuff I don’t watch or YouTube shorts. Same with search. It is so terrible, you get maybe 2-4 relevant results and then it again weights all the YouTube slop.

Nowadays if I want to see videos on a certain topic (not searching for a specific video), I usually ask an AI assistant. It uses web search with multiple related phrases and then picks the relevant ones out. I find this to be very effective right now, but of course in the future they could enshittify these assistants too.

Try skipvids search it removes all the noise, including shorts and ai slop

> you are forced to watch the 3 top videos, some 3 ads and then it forces you to watch some other random unrelated crap, it's so annoying and frustrating

Brother, you are the one choosing the videos.

Exactly the sort of user hostility I’d expect from a google employee. Shameful.

Maybe if practical tools such as like-ratios were in place users could sort good content from bad.

Good thing I work on internal infrastructure and not pointing a gun to this guy's head to prevent him from scrolling down past the first three results or refining his query.

There is no "scrolling down past the first 3 results" because everything after that is recommended garbage that's unrelated to the search query. And as they already said, "refining the search query" doesn't work because it wouldn't find the video even if they searched its exact title.

Furthermore, search is fundamentally broken in that it translates your query and then tries to match every title in every language that is vaguely similar. Of course it still only gives you a handful of results before listing off unrelated recommendations in the "search results".

Search used to work great ~10 years ago and I used to find majority of content that way. These days it's so useless I don't really bother trying anymore.

Reading comments like this really shines a light on why Youtube is as bad as it is, I didn't expect the employees to be this out of touch with the product that their company makes.

> Reading comments like this really shines a light on why Youtube is as bad as it is

I have about as much say in YouTube as you do. In the org tree, the lowest common ancestor between me and YouTube is Sundar.

My original comment was a joke about the fact that someone felt as if they were "forced" to watch something. It was more of a comment on consumer attitude than YouTube itself. I'm sorry YT isn't working well for y'all. That said, expecting some grunt employee like me to feel personally responsible (or even "ashamed"??) is ridiculous.

> I'm sorry YT isn't working well for y'all. That said, expecting some grunt employee like me to feel personally responsible (or even "ashamed"??) is ridiculous.

The point of a company is what it does: The money in your paycheck comes from anti-competitive behavior, denying accountability and customer support to your users, and yes, even the enshittification of Youtube.

Deny it all you want, but you have every opportunity to walk away and do something better for society with your life if you so choose.

For real. Trying to find a specific video on youtube is a very similar experience to searching for legit cables and adapters on Amazon.

There are no results past the first three videos.

What a weird comment. Given that you clearly don't use YouTube, why did you feel the need to engage?

It's gone massively downhill recently, noticeably so since the ability to sort by upload date was removed from the UI (and then very quickly removed from the API too). That was the final brick that prevented it from being literally unusable, now it's scroll and hope (and give up).

before:2024-08 after:2023-06 to the rescue? manual but works, even though on queries for "trending" keywords results will still be flooded with hits that should be filtered..

Nah, YouTube is absolutely shoving slop at users. They recently removed some of the search filters such as sorting by date, just to make it a little bit harder to find anything.

The search filters and the user interface in general on YouTube is garbage. you guys need to go back to the drawing board. it really is almost impossible to find a video, you have to sort through hundreds of AI slop clickbait videos in order to get to the one that you're actually interested in finding.

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