To improve search results on YouTube, use the search prefix “intitle:”
xn--1-zfa.comYouTube's search is horrible. No, I don't want "related results" that are completely unrelated to my query, neither results from my country when I specifically type in English and my whole UI is in English and I never watch non-English content while logged in.
Don't forget how you get five or six results from your search term before it starts listing random videos like it has ADHD.
I'm sure the YT PMs have proof that this improves engagement.
On a similar note, I've started noticing the third video in the "related videos" section on the right-hand sidebar is usually a new video with _extremely_ clickbait and inflammatory titles - sometimes with little connection to the topics I usually watch.
They're extremely distracting so I've set up a uBlock filter for these: `www.youtube.com##ytd-compact-video-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(3)`
This doesn't work 100% of the time, but it's good enough. (in particular, it fails if what I'm watching is a trailer video which makes the 2nd recommendation in the sidebar be a movie recommendation which doesn't fit this rule; as a result it blocks the 4th entry in the list, but oh well)
>> I'm sure the YT PMs have proof that this improves engagement.
...and it probably does in the short term, as you just try to engage more with the software trying ever harder to find what you want. But probably also kills engagement in the long term. Personal experience with this: Facebook post-2020 vs Facebook pre-2015.
Facebook pre-2015 was so magical as I was finally reconnecting with long-lost school friends and childhood neighbors we long lost touch with (pre-email friends.)
Facebook post-2020 is me engaging desperately to see something other than the same 10 repeated posts per day...knowing full well that the magic is still in there, just not visible by default. And then one day I just stopped checking.
Yes there was this one day where you open Facebook and literally every other post is Sponsored. And this Reels thing with some random videos from whatever.
But yeah anyway, do you still know people who actually post on Facebook?
No, but I kind of miss it. My Facebook years were roughly 2008-2011, and they were magical. You’d talk with your friends in a fun, async, low stress manner, look at funny posts, hear about shitty but fun local shows, post literally random bs you were thinking. And people you know would really engage, Unironically and in good faith. I don’t remember a lot of clout farming in those days (MySpace had a decent amount, so I’m sure it existed).
I don’t think any other social media came close to how purely good Facebook was in its golden years. I’d love for someone to write a book on how it declined.
> I'm sure the YT PMs have proof that this improves engagement.
I sometimes wonder if the opposite is true - that the PMs can convince the upper managment that users are staying on the website longer with all those stupid as fuck shit changes, but in reality they are there longer because it's increasingly more difficult to find anything you are looking for
Sort of 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure'
Yes, like the way modern shopping centres seem to be designed to disorient.
Not to disorient, but to force you travel past most isles, increasing the chance of impulse buys.
No, they are literally designed so it is difficult to tell where you are and which ways lead to exits, because it increases the amount of impulsive purchases.
This mind trick is called the Gruen transfer.
I thought they were just incompetent, but I think you're right.
Successfully being a PM and successfully managing a product are often at odds with each other. I've seen few do it well. Not really picking on PMs either, as both an SDE and now an EM I deal with similar tensions. Gotta love corpo life.
Could you elaborate that a bit more on this? I am on SDE side and keen on understanding the PM motivations as well
Reminds me of that scene from The Office (US) where Phyllis is calling 411 to inquire about anti-gravity machines and they ask if she'll settle for...
well just watch... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG1NeA3WoKc
She was so perfectly cast as Sadness. Hope that actress is actually happy but she does depressed so well!
She was really good in The OA
Do you notice if being signed in affects this? Just set out to try it (not signed in) from the first video that came up when I searched "Linux" and kept clicking the third video wondering how long until I get to Hitler.
Never got there. After a brief detour in some Greek channels I can't comment on, I ended up in a seemingly endless loop of mindfully woke TEDx talks (as in, no political or inflammatory stuff, just different variations of "how to live your life to the fullest", "this is how your brain works", "the secret to to happiness/productivity/communication...", etc.
Good point re being signed in.
Logged in:
Watching RedLetterMedia video, get recommended a clickbaity video about comic books: https://postimg.cc/QVkc7QwQ
Watching Colombo snippets, get recommended some celeb Net Worth trashy video: https://postimg.cc/grRNTL5j
Climate Town links to some unrelated video about Orlando amusement parks: https://postimg.cc/jW0zNMxh
These are way milder than I remember, btw.
Logged out, no weird recommendations:
So yeah, logged out doesn't have that 3rd obnoxious video, which is kind of interesting.
F*k such PMs, seriously. With all the anti-pattern behavior I see from different companies, these PMs shouldn't stay in their job for more than a day. Let a senior engineer with domain expertise take the position.
As if the company-wide engagement focus doesn't come from the very top.
> with _extremely_ clickbait and inflammatory titles
A number of YT'ers I follow have mentioned this is basically required now for any sort of rankings.
I wonder if blocking whole channels counts as 'engagement'
Until this changes to the 4th or 2nd
I have a curated home page of videos, yet I could search for "WW2 documentary" and YouTube will intersperse after the 5th result some trending video about the Kardashians.
Search has become one of the most dysfunctional features in Google products. I am extremely annoyed that I am paying for YouTube Premium, I might just pull the plug and install a network-wide ad blocker system so I can vote with my wallet.
God, I hate modern Google.
Network blocking won't help much with the drivel. I suggest using Vanced for your phones/computers and SmartTube for your TV. Auto-skipping sponsored segments, intros, and filler is a real game-changer.
It's frustrating that searches are now "whatever we want to promote to you" instead of real searches.
Something similar happens on Twitter when you search for something in the "Top" tab. It doesn't show you results with your search terms. Instead, it shows something peripherally related to what you searched, but much more popular and engaging.
I always thought I landed in some weird A/B test variant, but damn is it global? This sounds... wrong.
It's better for YouTube to show you videos that make them money instead of showing you results that you actually looked for.
Youtube is starting to become more like television, or Netflix.
YouTube's KPIs for promoting videos are totally off base in my opinion. They use click through rates and watch time as key indicators, which can easily be manipulated by bots, which is pretty obvious now as rampant on the platform with popular videos showing millions and billions of views, while the majority of posts (from small creators only get 100 or less views over years on the platform.
On YouTube, you get thrown in a trash bin unless you're able to pay or generate traffic from popularity elsewhere.
YT also puts too much emphasis on post titles now, many posters outright clone titles, which in turn botches search results massively. It was a terrible decision YT made to deprioritize taxonomy (hash tags) years ago in order to reduce moderation staff-- Of which, if taxonomy actually worked, feedback could better identify inaccurate and mis-leading content when compared to thumbs down rates... The options for video result sorting have been terribly limited and almost useless as well for ages now.
A big conflict of interest is that YouTube sells and promotes ad-based content boosting to creators, which contradicting-ly makes them more geared towards promoting content that falls under this (paid promotional) category first. It also drives YouTube to lower organic reach for users to drive them towards paying for promotion more year over year... That also encourages the platform to subvert organically good/upvoted content. YT can't logically sell the idea that organic growth is a possibility any more citing the underlying fact that they feature paid promotion without labeling every promoted item of that content as such, it's shocking how they get away with this contradiction of authenticity regularly.
The older engagement methods were far better for YouTube's content quality and authenticity. Now too many users are driven to post repetitive and dragged out videos, with titles based on trends, with decreasing originality and substance.
The current YouTube/TikTok success model is training everyone to conform to a single theme and format, encouraging idea, topic, and content cloning, and into repeating and simply reacting to what popular channels do.
YouTube content will all only continue to get worse and more monotonous if the same ideals on paid promotion continue, and creator success/profit will continue to shrink. (Just my opinion of course).
YouTube’s search is carefully optimized to keep viewers watching video after video, and ad after ad, for as long as possible. That’s why the search returns popular videos, ones that suck in viewers, rather than ones that match your search terms.
I'm actually finding myself watching YouTube less and less because of this. If we were to anthropomorphize the AI, I'd say it's trying pretty desperately to bring me to a "popular cluster".
In my experience, its significantly more aggressive at this than it used to be. The only reason I have a Google/YouTube account in the first place is so I can go to youtube.com and see a list of reasonable interesting videos to watch, based on what I watched before. But in the last few months it keeps pushing more and more "popular" content in there, which is often complete drivel IMHO. I don't even mind if YouTube would show unrelated content, as long as it's interesting, but usually it's not. The entire reason YouTube wins out over regular TV is so I can avoid this kind of stuff.
I've been flagging these things as "not interested" for months now, but it feels like fighting windmills because it has no discernible effect. The effect of all of this is that YouTube is a lot less useful to me than it used to be.
I feel the same way. YouTube is by far my primary streaming platform of any kind (audio or video) and recently the algorithm’s obsession with click bait is making it way less useful to me. This is leading me to watch Nebula and listen to podcasts a lot more. A couple of months ago I noticed a rapid change in the YouTube home page results. There is a channel I watch that uploads four videos or so every day and I always watch every single one immediately. Normally when I open the home page the latest video from that channel is at the very top of the list, and I usually click on it. Then one day it just wasn’t! The channel was continuing to upload and grow in size but the algorithm decided to throw all kinds of low quality stuff at me, to the point I felt like I had been logged out even when I wasn’t. I complained to YouTube on twitter and I don’t know what happened but after about five days of this nonsense things returned to normal, but then began to slowly degrade again. It felt like I had been A/B tested for a new change which then got pulled back and made more subtle. But it is still a bad change!
I don’t know what they’re optimizing for but it certainly isn’t my enjoyment.
Last week youtube decided to start pushing pus / pimple popping videos, and push them hard. I've never shown interest, this was purely the algorithm's idea.
Gross.
I had to install an extension to get it to stop because "Not Interested" and "Don't Recommend Channel" don't work in search results, even though they are turning search results into just another front page :/
Which extension did you use for this?
I basically use YouTube only without logging in, and rely a lot on the front page for my current interests (channels I want to remember long-term go in my RSS reader). It seems like YouTube always has a channel or two it insists on pushing repeatedly no matter how often I ignore their videos.
BlockTube. It's great! Highly recommended.
I don't watch interesting videos anymore.
Too interesting, too holy shit wow can't believe that, wow. Like sometimes an EE thing yes, then it makes sense, basically a guy talking about an oscilloscope or television then it's part of the show to use a television to talk about it. And only when they link to it externally.
But interesting for its own sake? Rather talk to the men on the street, those guys are interesting, have great stories.
You're the exception. They naturally do A/B testing and are data-driven to optimize for said objectives.
Yeah, I know, line goes up when taking the population average. Must even point in the direction of ads watchers and clickers. Taking into account the shitty videos this cost function promotes, I honestly get a little proud of this algorithm not working for me.
Would be nice for us to have a little more control and transparency over where the AI is taking us, though, specially for us YouTube Premium payers.
I’m sure if YouTube PMs could they would mail you cocaine if it made you watch enough ads.
So do I. The only way I "get" content lately is to see what my subscriptions are up to. Search is effectively impossible.
They might have a minus sign somewhere it shouldn't be.
I mainly use youtube for my music playlist. Where I add songs after someone points me to it and I like it.
You probably don't make them much money anyway.
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
-Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
At least the algorithm isn't totally amnesic; no other site remembers that content can have enduring relevance.
Firefox plugin to remove distracting crap[2] such as 'related results' on search pages.
[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
If you use uBlock Origin you can remove most cruft by adding these rules to Settings > My filters:
youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element youtube.com###hover-overlays youtube.com##yt-icon.ytd-badge-supported-renderer youtube.com###related youtube.com###donation-shelfThanks I tried it out and the setting is called "Hide Inapt Search Results" (it's on by default but it also disables recommendations everywhere by default so you might need to disable the other options).
I'm old enough to remember when Google was popular because of its search quality.
I'm old enough to remember when YouTube search results about political or current events weren't curated or weighted toward mainstream media takes.
Searching for an 'unperson' will always return zero results nowadays. Edit: I guess that is just for Facebook now but my point stands. The results for certain searches are manipulated manually whether easily noticeable or not.
> neither results from my country
This. There's a lot youtubers from my country who has crap content presented in a cringey way.
Like, if I search for "second order vibrations in internal combustion engine", I get hundreds of people explaining it in local languages I don't even speak, in a way that's targeted at college students cramming for finals (think equations on a notepad without explaining what physically goes on).
Makes me wanna leave this place. That would be funny, isn't it? Emigrating because local YouTube content is cringe.
(I turned off all tracking things that can be turned off from their UI, but I suppose they can still figure out where I'm from unless I use a VPN).
One of the craziest things about YouTube search I don't understand is how you'll search for the name of someone, and their channel won't show up in the first results. Sometimes, often really, it won't show up at all, and you'll have to figure out other ways to phrase your queries. You kind of need to go with a long channel name that can be abbreviated like "Bob65's Engineering tricks", so people have the full name as a fallback, in case "bob65" doesn't work.
Feels like they really want you to subscribe and engage with the "related" videos instead of the real deal, which sucks for channel owners, especially if it's channels who profit on being weirdly intrusive and hostile towards said channels or people.
youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/For you/) youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/New for you/) youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/People also watched/) youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/Previously watched/) youtube.com##ytd-horizontal-card-list-renderer:has-text(/People also search for/)At the same time when I want to find a song it often is enough to somewhat be phonetically in the realms of song's text or mention a characteristic object from the video clip if I saw it and it will often be the first result.
> neither results from my country
Might be related to some local law or simply pressure from lawmakers, eg Canada is experimenting with such a law: https://www.medianama.com/2022/06/223-canada-bill-streaming-...
> neither results from my country when I specifically type in English and my whole UI is in English and I never watch non-English content while logged in.
Google in general is annoyingly insistent in localizing results. It used to be that google.com gave you english results and you would go to google.ccTLD to get a local experience. Then they changed it to google.com being localized by default (even though my browser is set to english) but you could click a link to go back to the english version from the home page. Now they even hide that link when you go the the home page via the google logo (why????) and you have to explicitly go to google.com/ without a hl query parameter. And of course the english results are still localized somewhat (e.g. it'll show the local Wikipedia anlong with the english one, even for articles that have fuck all to do with location).
www.google.com/ncr (No Country Redirect)
That doesn't change anything here.
What? Next you're gonna tell me you dislike auto translations of video titles?
(I seeming can't completely disable that annoying "feature")
There is a way to avoid "related results". Search from the command line using a simpler HTTP client to retrieve the first batch of results and use the public API to retrieve subsequent results as JSON into a results file. Using this method I can retrieve the full number of possible results, e.g., hundreds or thousands, not simply the first batch, e.g., 15, 25 or whatever. I call this "continuation" searching. No Javascript is required.
When people use highly complex graphical browsers and Javascript to make these requests it is sometimes triggered by a "button" at the bottom of a page called "more results" or something similar. Alternatively the requests may be triggered automatically when down scrolling, producing what some people call an "inifinite scroll" effect. Javascript is usually what produces the annoyances people experience. It is also used for tracking and telemetry.
The token for the public API to retrieve the next batch of results is the results file. Using a simpler HTTP client, I can (a) search YouTube very quickly and comprehensively entirely from the command line, (b) download videos without ever visiting a YouTube page in a graphical browser and being exposed to annoyances, tracking and telemetry (c) switch from retrieving via search string to retrieving via channel name, (d) mix the search and channel results into a single results file, (e) output a TSV table from the results file. Currently I include the following fields in the TSV table:
YouTubeID Title ChannelName Duration SearchString/ChannelPath Search/Channel
The last field is just an indicator of whether the result is from a search or a channel.
Videos are browsed and selected using a TSV table instead of an HTML search results page.^1 Because I am interested in videos of a certain duration, including "unpopular" videos with low view counts, I have found this is an optimal search method. No distractions. YouTube wants people to view popular, low quality, "viral" videos, e.g., "fake news", extremism and the like, because this "content" is optimal for their advertising business model. Hence automatic "recommendations". This is what makes YouTube search so horrible. Advertising as a "business model" for websites can influence design and have very harmful downstream effects.
1. The HTML pages for videos are where the "recommendations" come from. Thus I never see the recommendations as they are not part of this search/retrieval method. I could extract them from the HTML into a table if I wanted to see them, but I choose not to. I only extract the video download URLs from the pages for the videos.
We have a different understanding of the phrase “very easy”.
It's really odd, everyone said search was the main reason to put videos on YouTube instead of self hosting/with a CDN. I guess all they have now is inertia, kind of like the cable companies had.
You can use Google search instead: https://www.google.com/search?q=whatever&tbm=vid&lr=lang_en&...
> No, I don't want "related results" that are completely unrelated to my query,
This, but with LinkedIn and jobs
I really don't understand this sentiment. All my queries return exactly the video I'm looking for - often times surprisingly well, even.
- [ ] ENH: yt mobile app: Share search query urls
- [ ] ENH,SCH: https://schema.org/MediaObject and search cards
- [ ] UBY: search: transcript search snippets
This is great.
Lately I've been learning to play traditional Irish music. Often I'll want to hear as many versions of a tune as I can; don't care if it's studio musicians, a session at a bar, or a few mates in their kitchen, as long as it includes the specified tune.
What will often happen if I search, for example, "Monaghan Jig," is that I'll get a few results from famous albums and professional YouTube content creators, then a bunch of other jigs, The Hag At The Churn, Lark in The Morning etc. and they'll drown out videos with the actual jig I want.
After that I have to experiment with variations like, "Monaghan Jig concertina," "Monaghan Jig pub session" etc to find the other videos YouTube's search had dismissed for me that indeed included "Monaghan Jig" in both the title and the content.
With this operator I can hopefully save myself a lot of guesswork and frustration.
I'm just glad that there's still an operator that isn't just ignored.
I half suspect that this is a mistake and youtube will correct it quickly once word spreads.
I'm suprised to see that some say Youtube's search is bad. I often find myself wishing that that I could get a youtube level of accuracy in my Google searches. I don't usually scroll to find the result I'm looking for. I tend to find the big view and small view videos with the same level ease.
*Also a premium subscriber. Youtube in many ways is a necessary part of this version of the internet experience and I detest having to sit through all the ads...if I have to pay $10/month seems fair to me. Just my 02 cents.
The search is usually pretty good to surface the top few results.
But the use case I have, that seems to consistently work poorly, is when I'm looking for all videos that contain a certain person and search by name. In these cases, YouTube shows you the top few results (which are typically the most viewed clips that match the query), then it shows you "related" videos (which typically don't contain that person at all), then it shows you videos that you have previously watched (I don't understand why). Eventually, if you keep scrolling down, you get another few batches of results ranked in the same way and potentially you might get all the relevant results. It's just quite hard to do so.
While we're here, does YouTube search support date range specifiers? I sometimes want to find a video I remember being published in, say, 2014, but the title might be hard to search for or get buried under similar names. YouTube's UI filters only let me limit to some hard-coded ranges, all of which prioritize recent videos.
I found this site that has operators you can type in the search bar:
https://seosly.com/youtube-search-operators/
Date operators:
I tried the search:before:[date] after:[date] [search term], today [search term], last hour [search term], this month [search term], this year
And it appeared to work like you'd expect.tesla, before:2019-01-02, after:2019-01-01Edit: I'm not sure how intuitive the operators are. Ex: Combining them doesn't seem to give the expected results.
It's so weird to me how hard it is to find this sort of reference information.
I experienced the same thing when looking for a definitive list of voice commands for Android auto.
In the old days we carried around pocket sized cards with the full set of all possible instructions/ parameters.
These days you have to search on Google, and then look at whichever ad-ridden hellhole has played the SEO game most effectively. That might have the answers, or it might be stale since it was originally copied and pasted from some other site long ago.
Why doesn't YouTube provide this information themselves?
believe its your use of commas,
need to use plus "+"
tesla, before:2019-01-02 + after:2019-01-01
i came across another site that had a few more, https://granwehr.com/blog/youtube-search-operators#15-advanc...
The date range filter of your search engine of choice, combined with 'site:youtube.com'. You also get the other behaviours of that search engine, though Google probably has the most complete index in this case.
I've also tried the 'sort by oldest' programmed Google search that was posted here,[1] but its index seems to be missing many pages—youtube videos with few views in particular—compared to general Google.
Is it possible to build a third party YouTube search by scraping a) YouTube and b) the user’s watch history?
To me it seems like there’s some mid-to-low hanging fruit there. YT’s recommender fails to understand when a video is part of a series so often I almost have to think it’s intentional. Also recommending videos I’ve already watched in my homepage feed? What?
What bugs me the most is that it wasn’t always this bad. Somebody changed it a couple of years ago.
Certaily gotta be against youtube's TOS and it'll get shut down
Yup. You're allowed to cache for a short while but you're not allowed to store and serve
source: My YouTube API key was blocked for this sort of thing shortly after GDPR came into effect
Invidious was such project, IIRC.
...and still is.
Unfortunately it does not improve the search results either, because AFAIK it only proxies them from YT itself.
To improve search results on Google, append site:reddit.com to your query :)
Google's search is amazingly stupid as of late.
For the query "monkeypox gym" I'm getting COVID-19 results.
For the query "social network without kids" I'm getting results for social networks aimed at kids.
For the query "cakes without strawberries" I'm getting... This: https://imgur.com/a/Os1kkcP
while those are pretty ridiculous examples that google should definately handle better, the cake one can be effectively done as
"cakes -strawberries"
Kinda. This was an example I made up on the fly, but sometimes you don't just want to exclude a term from the search, but you want to see it explicitly semantically excluded in the document.
Eg, "js without transpilation" gives quality results, but often times, especially when it's dealing with more popular search queries, it just kinda focuses on the keywords without any context.
For the search "social media without kids" I was actually looking for some articles that would focus on how the content changes depending on the age group. Or articles about social media focused on "adult things" like HN.
What I got was https://imgur.com/a/0tt8g4r
And I won't even get started on the blog spam content aggregate sites which seem to be over half of the results.
Google seriously needs to find a way out of this mess.
You are right, but even if it's simple, it's not something the average user will know.
It's crazy how often I find myself doing this. The results returned still aren't always amazing but it pretty consistently massively improves signal-to-noise.
What good would that be if I am not interested in visiting that site? What an odd suggestion
The point is to force Google towards a site you expect may have the result you want. site:news.ycombinator.com works for similar reasons.
Basically, you can find (likely organic) discussion of topics by groups who are familiar with the subject and are likely to quickly correct any incorrect or misleading statements.
Otherwise, Google will believe that some no-name site with generated content is... somehow... a good search result. The 'reddit' approach works poorly for me recently, Google gets stuck in certain sub-reddits and there's a lot of low quality or bot content on reddit to filter out anyway.
All I want is to be able to remove channels from my search, similar to removing pinterest from Google search.
It's not directly available in search but from the home page you can click the triple dot menu and click Don't recommend channel.
That doesn't remove a channel from search unfortunately.
I don’t even think it blocks the channel long term from your recommendations. I’m pretty sure they’ve tried to sneak in an old channel I’ve explicitly said not to recommend again in my recommendations via whatever multi armed bandit with noise algo they’re running.
I ended up adding more and more ublock origin block entries for each channel I REALLY want to avoid.
BlockTube removes videos based on words in titles and channel names: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/blocktube/
Don't want to give another extension access to read my screen though. Why do extensions require such broad access? Can't think of this needing anything outside the YouTube domain
> Can't think of this needing anything outside the YouTube domain
Doesn't appear to given the permissions listed:
"Access your data for www.youtube.com"
For firefox users:
Extension [1] gives a little 'X' beside the channel name in home and search, that can be used to completely remove that channel from all future searches.
Similarly, remove a bunch of random distracting crap[2] such as 'related results'.
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-clean...
[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
I just checked this works -"channel name" (it only works if the channel name is in quotes)
I'll have to try it, I need it on the mobile app.
Being able to subscribe to specific playlists and keep specific playlists from your subscriptions would be wondrous. There's a ton of channels I'd like to subscribe to but they just pollute my Subscriptions page too much.
You can add a playlist to your library and it will show up in the Playlists section. Navigate to the playlist and look for an icon with throw horizontal lines and a check mark.
I did a youtube search for:
attaching a prehung door
and
intitle: attaching a prehung door
and the results are identical (for me at least). The results are also extremely relevant and concise in showing me how to install a prehung door. I am not really sure what people mean. Are people asking youtube to find videos that don't exist? like "how to make tritan plastic"
HN will often claim something is unusable and not what it used to be when the general public is quite happy with it and its working very well. I think it's more a bias against the wider product or company. HN users do not like YouTube and Google in general so any minor issue gets overblown while they would be quite happy to compile a new kernel to get PeerTube running.
It's not a conspiracy that Google/Youtube search have degraded to near unusable for niche searches. All I can say is that you're probably not searching for anything too specific.
I have searched for specific things a lot. Usually I just search what I remember being in the video rather than what I thought the title was. The right video comes up even when the words I search did not show up in the title or description. Google's ability to search is only just short of being magic.
Meanwhile, the products which HN promotes regularly like Mastodon and PeerTube fail to find things with directly searching the title text because P2P search is completely non functional.
I'll give you an example. I was recently searching for an old blog post I read about a guy who installed fiber at his home. No amount of specific or vague search terms on google would yield anything but endless pages of results that were either blogspam or ISP product pages for fiber internet. Surely google doesn't think an ISP in Australia offering fiber is relevant enough to an SF resident that it should be on the second page of results.
Results get exponentially worse the more pages in you go. By page 3 the only results are ISP's. Basically if it isn't on page 1, it's just padding almost totally unrelated to what you were looking for.
Is it possible they took down the blog or blog post? That happens and no amount of google wishing brings that back.
People typically compare products with previous iterations of themselves.
Do you have any data to back up the claim that Youtube search has deteriorated a lot? (The phrase "it's no conspiracy" implies to me that it's some obvious, or widely-agreed-upon, truth).
Anecdotally, I absolutely love youtube search.
If it works anything like with the plain Google search, the modifier only applies to text directly following the colon.
E.g.:
will find all videos with "door" in their title.intitle:door
will find all videos where these two words in exactly that order are mentioned in the title.intitle:"prehung door"So to have it search for all words in the title, you'd have to do a search for:
intitle:attaching intitle:a intitle:prehung intitle:doorOr use,
But it seems that allintitle can only be used at the beginning of a query, so there's no way to combine it with non-title keywords.allintitle: attaching a prehung doorEngines supporting parentheses like Reddit's or Elasticsearch prevail here:
But for some reason that doesn't work in Wikipedia's search, even though CirrusSearch is based on Elasticsearch.title:(attaching a prehung door)
I just did "tour de france 2022 stage 4" and "intitle: tour de france 2022 stage 4". For me the results are close but notably the first several results went from an average video length of ~4 minutes to ~40 minutes, including someone's two-hour-long stream.
Maybe it really depends on what you're searching for. But I also rarely see many irrelevant results, including for this search.
Reminds me of this comment hinting at a search technique that the user doesn't want to say publicly lest YouTube remove it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630286
(What is it?? :P)
If I had a magic wand, I'd create a non-profit, funded by the world's governments, to host the bulk of the world's videos. Wojcicki's Youtube doesn't care if when a user browses the site, it's like wading through a sea of garbage, as long as the user browses for as many hours as possible.
Browsing YouTube without an AdBlocker and cosmetic filters that hide emblems and badges on the video player is truly shocking. I really sense the goal of YouTube isn’t to get you to watch something, it’s to get you to watch something else - at all times.
I’ve seen it recommend related videos as soon as the video starts playing. It will recommend videos as soon as you click pause. There will be little interstitial recommendation overlays as it plays. How desperate must product managers at YouTube be to push this so strongly?
Thankfully I crafted some filters to hide all of this, but it’s so user hostile that I feel bad for anyone that doesn’t know how to get rid of all this noise.
But hey, they removed those in video notes that were actually useful a lot of the times. Or community closed captioning. Or being able to disable that fucking miniplayer when you are in a playlist and navigate somewhere else. I have multiple tabs for a reason FFS.
Didn't recognize the name, Googled her (CEO of YouTube), today is her birthday. Funny.
Up until 2018, I used to joke that "Youtube is CEO-less." There were articles bemoaning Youtube's toxicity, but they never contained the word 'Wojcicki'.
These days, the press sometimes – though still not often – mentions her name.
All search engines are bad now because search engines have turned into recommendation engines in the past 5-10 years.
Sometimes these tangentially-related search results help people discover new things they would've otherwise missed out on. I believe striking a balance between recommendations and to-the-point results is necessary.
Every time I have specifically searched for something on youtube I have found it. But most of the time on youtube I don't actually have something specific in mind. I'm just looking for something interesting or educational and I want suggestions.
I think they have been able to strike a really good balance between the use cases of directed searching and undirected consumption.
Search engines have always been recommendation engines.
In most cases, I'll take YouTube's default ranking, which might incorporate captioned text, comments, and other signals. Good to have this search operator as an option for specific uses.
Meta: It seems that HN lists the Punycode for this website's domain (xn--1-zfa.com), instead of the actual IDN that's displayed by the browser (ä1.com). This feels kind of odd to me.
[Punycode] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
[IDN] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
It poses a security risk and exploited to phish people.
Modern Browsers sanitize punycode, not so sure about bespoke browsers that live inside other mobile apps
Depends on your view. People who wotk with DNS want to see the actual domain, while end users might prefer the translation.
People who work with DNS know how to right-click and do “Copy Link”, or even to hover over a link and watch the status bar text.
Well, HN is a link aggregator, not a DNS tool.
I just want fewer ads. So many ads and sponsors. 10-15 second intro ads, then 10-second middle ads, and then ending ads. ANd then also sponsorship ads. I know there are extensions that can block some of these, but it's so aggravating too.
Who doesn't have uBlock Origin in this day and age? It blocks essentially every ad that Youtube pushes. Now, if you want no sponsors as well, go for SponsorBlock, it skips parts of the video marked as "sponsor" etc.
Not everyone watches youtube on their computer.
That's a massively good point that I somehow failed to remember. Thankyou. My bad.
Kiwi Browser on Android works with uBlock just fine, and I think Brave's built-in adblocker also stopped youtube ads for me, but I'm less sure of that one.
hey I am using Firefox, by uBlock Origin, I never saw even an ad for years, you can try this. I guess Chrome browser also got it.
uBlock Origin stops blocking ads on Youtube for at least a day every time Chrome is updated, unlike on Firefox, which is consistently blocking ads.
youtube premium is awesome. I can't recommend it enough.
Agreed. That said, YouTube Premium doesn't remove sponsor segments in videos, and these days many videos include a long segment about their sponsor of the day or their merch/patreon.
For this, I've recently discovered the Chrome extension SponsorBlock[1], which relies on user-submitted segments to auto-skip all kinds of off-topic segments in the video. You can choose to keep, skip, or mute segments like intros, sponsor promo, subscription reminders, and more. This metadata is not available on every single video, but in my experience it has made a huge difference in the amount of ads and repetitive reminders I see. Many videos get segment updates very quickly.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
I installed this recently after hitting an especially egregious sponsor segment. It's good, while it lasts.
I've been a YouTube premium subscribe for some number of years.
I easily watch 10 to 15 hours or more of video on YouTube each month, probably per week.
Plus YouTube Music makes it the best value streaming service I pay for.
I'm a YouTube Premium subscriber, but the one thing that would make me feel good about the subscription would be a way to block channels that show sponsored ads, even manually -- I pay money to avoid ads, and I understand that they can't, or choose not to, mark those videos that have ads anyway, but give me the tools to do it myself. (It looks like this might be possible in a browser, but Apple TV is my primary client, and the Apple TV app gets actively worse with each release...)
Brave search. Search for brave search, and you're back to when google was good.
(Not affiliated with brave at all, just really impressed by their search engine)
If anyone has similar tips for improving the search function of Amazon (shopping, not AWS) I'd be really interested in that as well. The search is so bad that I usually get better results by dorking with Google.
It's getting out of control. I think I am going to bail soon. Ads every few seconds, queries that do not match my input, crazy suggestions. It's actually worse than TV and magazines ffs.
Wait you can "improve" youtube search.
It is totally broken for me.
A lot of search queries give 90% of the results from 2 or 3 channels. If that is not the case, the results return almost the exact same results as what I got a few months back even though I know there is a ton of new content.
Youtube seems to put me in a box and there is no way out. I had to ditch youtube for spotify to get new music. Youtube seems to have become unusable unless you know the exact channel or video you want to watch.
Related topic, this site allows you to search on youtube video subtitles:
While we are here, is there a service that provides me with list of newly uploaded youtube videos? In my mother tongue (south indian language), I have many interesting channels but youtube does not surface them by default. I just want to go through the list and write an algorithm to filter them out based on mypreferences.
Is there somebody who scrapes them youtube and sells the data
Does the subscribe feature do what you are looking for?
Subscribe does not help me in discovering new channels on topics I want.
Subscribing doesn't show all videos, but only those that youtube thinks you may be interested in. If I get overwhelmed with content I can unsub to channels I no longer watch. Instead some sit in my subs list for years with regular uploads and never showing up in my sub list.
You can still use https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={CHANNEL... to pull up the RSS feed for a channel.
I use NewPipe on Android and it has an option to show a chronological list of all new videos from all channels I'm subscribed to.
That's reallyhelpful. I am building youtube integration right now and noticed how the search results are really weird.
How I make youtube bearable:
- subscribe through RSS only
- block all 'related videos' boxes with the picker tool from ublock
I am building a webapp that pulls YT subscriptions, lets you categorize them, and view videos by those categories. I have been using it daily for ~6 months instead of visiting YT directly. Considering finishing the last 20% and charging a small monthly fee in the $2-3 range. Not knowing how to find users for it has led to much procrastination.
Or just use Newpipe/Piped :).
Or FreeTube
I heard it stopped working lately?, A family member has it and it stopped working a few weeks ago, she had to revert to stock YouTube, and suddenly ads became the most annoying thing ever, lol.
From watching with closed captions turned on. I can guess why their search is so terrible. Loud noises turns into closed captions (the ones generated by them) which probably gets indexed.
This is brilliant. I can't believe I haven't thought of it.
I also recommend Distraction Free YouTube for blocking recommendations and (optionally) comments.
-- often read a lot of complaints about youtube search, a gentle reminder of the scale: "YouTube hosts over 800 million videos among 37 million channels on the platform. 1 billion videos are watched per day on YouTube by its over 2 billion users." - it's a wonder youtube isn't serving up vast amounts of junk in search - using the filters they provide I'm always able to find multiple decent videos about whatever I'm looking for - out of 800 million - not awful imo --
Like literally google owns youtube and it has something like 100 times that scale. Text searching on 800m strings is a solved problem.
I need better filters in the search. I want to search and then filter by views and sort by time, why is that not possible :(
The top results are typically copies of the original video you searched for, with padding to increase length of the video.
use yandex to search for youtube videos.
Similar here. I often use Google itself to search for YouTube videos since the results aren't as immediately filled with random nonsense as with YouTube's own search
I would be curious to know what other advance search type keywords work in YouTube
what i would appreciate is if i could not see videos ive seen before twice.
also the ability to search videos that is under a specific view count or likes that has bee uploaded between specific date ranges.
Sort by upload date also cuts out semi-related results
internet is over. everything is filled with BS.
Nice domain. Renders well on safari, at least.
Useful tip and website, thanks.
Exact term doesn't work.
Oh my, two posts where Google Dorking and #OSINT have found their way into posts. :) Love it!!! DefCon funzies abound on HN today.
https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/cyber-security-tutoria...
Search Engine - "Google Dorking" like inurl: intitle: intext: etc.
Also, google dorking has its "darkweb" side in forensics too. Enjoy.
I found in the <"indexof:" include/> clue that our Social Sciences faculty is wide open, thanks!