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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
[+] [-] slig|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] causi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] winternett|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] bdowling|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davisoneee|3 years ago|reply
[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
[+] [-] peterkelly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2143|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] kmfrk|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] v3v3|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hawski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] judge2020|3 years ago|reply
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-...
[+] [-] account42|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] Akronymus|3 years ago|reply
(I seeming can't completely disable that annoying "feature")
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] usrn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] niutech|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_only_law|3 years ago|reply
This, but with LinkedIn and jobs
[+] [-] turboponyy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] westurner|3 years ago|reply
- [ ] ENH,SCH: https://schema.org/MediaObject and search cards
- [ ] UBY: search: transcript search snippets
[+] [-] AlecSchueler|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jjoonathan|3 years ago|reply
I half suspect that this is a mistake and youtube will correct it quickly once word spreads.
[+] [-] oogabooga13|3 years ago|reply
*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.
[+] [-] i_have_an_idea|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jbay808|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] groovybits|3 years ago|reply
https://seosly.com/youtube-search-operators/
Date operators:
I tried the search: And it appeared to work like you'd expect.Edit: I'm not sure how intuitive the operators are. Ex: Combining them doesn't seem to give the expected results.
[+] [-] mgdlbp|3 years ago|reply
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31333436
[+] [-] toxik|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mtoner23|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbirth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matbatt38|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] synaesthesisx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baxuz|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beebeepka|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] post_break|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] savanaly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timbit42|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhacker|3 years ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] mgdlbp|3 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630286
(What is it?? :P)
[+] [-] thomassmith65|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clircle|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xnx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tijdreiziger|3 years ago|reply
[Punycode] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
[IDN] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
[+] [-] paulpauper|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firebaze|3 years ago|reply
https://search.brave.com/
(Not affiliated with brave at all, just really impressed by their search engine)
[+] [-] cnixon1234|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beebeepka|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] capybara_2020|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hexage1814|3 years ago|reply
https://filmot.com
[+] [-] throwawaygog6|3 years ago|reply
Is there somebody who scrapes them youtube and sells the data