YouTube'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.
This is great.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>With this operator I can hopefully save myself a lot of guesswork and frustration.
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.<p>*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.
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.
Is it possible to build a third party YouTube search by scraping a) YouTube and b) the user’s watch history?<p>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?<p>What bugs me the most is that it wasn’t always this bad. Somebody changed it a couple of years ago.
I did a youtube search for:<p>attaching a prehung door<p>and<p>intitle: attaching a prehung door<p>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"
Reminds me of this comment hinting at a search technique that the user doesn't want to say publicly lest YouTube remove it.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630286" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630286</a><p>(<i>What is it?? :P</i>)
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.
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.<p>[Punycode] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode</a><p>[IDN] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name</a>
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.
Brave search. Search for brave search, and you're back to when google was good.<p><a href="https://search.brave.com/" rel="nofollow">https://search.brave.com/</a><p>(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.<p>It is totally broken for me.<p>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.<p>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:<p><a href="https://filmot.com" rel="nofollow">https://filmot.com</a>
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.<p>Is there somebody who scrapes them youtube and sells the data
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.<p>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 --
what i would appreciate is if i could not see videos ive seen before twice.<p>also the ability to search videos that is under a specific view count or likes that has bee uploaded between specific date ranges.
Oh my, two posts where Google Dorking and #OSINT have found their way into posts. :) Love it!!! DefCon funzies abound on HN today.<p><a href="https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/cyber-security-tutorial/google-dorking" rel="nofollow">https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/cyber-security-tutoria...</a><p>Search Engine - "Google Dorking" like inurl: intitle: intext: etc.<p>Also, google dorking has its "darkweb" side in forensics too. Enjoy.<p><a href="https://www.exploit-db.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.exploit-db.com/</a>