YouTube's search function is atrocious now [video]

Post by xetplan » Wed, Feb 21, 2024, 1:01 PM UTC

nozzlegear wrote: post #41

troad wrote: post #18

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. 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…

> 'Tearful father says goodbye to daughter before gang assassination' I’ve had this one suggested to me multiple times as well for completely unrelated content. It’s not the kind of thing that I watch or would click on even out of curiosity, but YouTube really thinks I should watch it for some reason.

Post by Tarq0n » Wed, Feb 21, 2024, 1:53 PM UTC

mid-kid wrote: post #55

frfl wrote: post #6

Life hack, maybe it will help someone out: Add a "before:YYYY" to the search to go back to a simpler time. Eg, "before:2012 python talk" As an experiment open two tabs and compare the results of "python talk" and "before:2012 python talk". The difference is staggering.

My only complaint about this is that so much of the old stuff has been removed, privated, marked as age restricted, blurred due to refusal to be marked as "for kids"[1] and removing the comment section, or otherwise made inaccessible by their authors. The reason usually being that it's embarassing or otherwise doesn't reflect the uploader's modern persona. A lot of awesome content is missing from the results due to t…

Post by aaron695 » Wed, Feb 21, 2024, 2:22 PM UTC

Post by renegat0x0 » Wed, Feb 21, 2024, 2:41 PM UTC

Post by rchaud » Wed, Feb 21, 2024, 3:26 PM UTC

ryeights wrote: post #9

leoh wrote: post #3

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.

This would amount to doing free labor to prop up a trillion dollar company’s subpar product. Then again, YouTube is only barely profitable as-is right? And getting people to switch to a more sustainable paid alternative is a non-starter. So maybe this is the future we deserve