Life hack, maybe it will help someone out: Add a "before:YYYY" to the search to go back to a simpler time.<p>Eg, "before:2012 python talk"<p>As an experiment open two tabs and compare the results of "python talk" and "before:2012 python talk". The difference is staggering.
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.
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.<p>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.
The UX for google products has gotten so much worse.<p>I've had problems with youtube search recently, but because I use google more often it's so much more obvious with google search.<p>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.
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.<p>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:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1G9vIyNL20&t=491s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1G9vIyNL20&t=491s</a><p>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.
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.
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.
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.<p>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:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=games+that+think+more+gameplay+mechanics+equals+more+fun" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=games+that+thin...</a><p>He expects it to list his video with that title:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZKcZbi1rg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZKcZbi1rg</a><p>But that video... just isn't in the search results <i>at all</i>. 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 <i>broken</i>. Yikes.<p>Note that it <i>does</i> finds the video as the #1 result if you search only within his channel:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/@ProZD/search?query=games%20that%20think%20more%20gameplay%20mechanics%20equals%20more%20fun" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/@ProZD/search?query=games%20that%20t...</a><p>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.<p>This is just an instance where YouTube search is just flat-out <i>broken</i>. 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.
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.
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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>Youtube employees here, do you really believe it makes people more likely to watch youtube videos? It doesnt.<p>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.<p>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...
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 <i>at best</i> because they're often not related at all. Who wants this?
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?<p>This isn’t going to get better on behalf of YT product teams, and Sora et al are going to ratchet up the stakes
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.
The worst offender is YouTube mobile page search. You cannot provide filters there at all.<p>I use my own RSS reader for YouTube. Then I search RSS feeds for anything useful.
I was just reading this earlier today!<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification</a>
'<i>Now</i>'??!? Youtube's search has been literally broken for more than a year, several of us mentioned this on HN months ago.<p>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.<p>Nothing's gonna save their query system except Google's backend engineers. Good luck waiting for that.<p>---<p>Until then I highly recommend using userscripts/addons to bring <i>some</i> sanity back to using the platform:<p>'Block Youtube Users' : "<i>hides videos of users/channels from home, search, related, and comments</i>"<p><a href="https://greasyfork.org/scripts/11057-block-youtube-users" rel="nofollow">https://greasyfork.org/scripts/11057-block-youtube-users</a><p>~~ My favorite! It's like GHHbD[0] but from <i>within</i> Youtube.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jeffersonscher.com/gm/google-hit-hider/</a><p>---<p>'YouTube: Hide Watched Videos' by EvHaus : '<i>mask or hide visibility of watched videos and shorts</i>'<p><a href="https://github.com/EvHaus/youtube-hide-watched">https://github.com/EvHaus/youtube-hide-watched</a><p>---<p>'Return WATCHED badge on Youtube (with custom text)' by q1k : "<i>Brings back the WATCHED overlay to the videos you have already watched</i>"<p><a href="https://greasyfork.org/scripts/419722-return-watched-badge-on-youtube-with-custom-text" rel="nofollow">https://greasyfork.org/scripts/419722-return-watched-badge-o...</a><p>---<p>'YouTube Clickbait-Buster' by hjk789 : "<i>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</i>"<p><a href="https://github.com/hjk789/Userscripts/tree/master/YouTube-Clickbait-Buster">https://github.com/hjk789/Userscripts/tree/master/YouTube-Cl...</a><p>---<p>'Youtube Scrollable Right Side Description' by sh3ll : "<i>Description is moved on the right, expanded and scrollable (and a view-count is put under the player)"</i>
{FYI: if you use a white or light theme on YT, go into the script and change the view-count text to something dark}<p><a href="https://greasyfork.org/scripts/452405-youtube-scrollable-right-side-description" rel="nofollow">https://greasyfork.org/scripts/452405-youtube-scrollable-rig...</a><p>---<p>'Make "Videos" the default tab on Youtube channels', a contrib by Scriptchansky<p><a href="https://greasyfork.org/en/discussions/requests/56798#comment-392349" rel="nofollow">https://greasyfork.org/en/discussions/requests/56798#comment...</a>