So true. The thing I find bizarre about youtube is how bad not only their recommendations but their search is. This is a Google company but somehow if I search for a specific episode in a specific series (eg one episode in a game walkthrough or whatever) it can't get the ranking right?

I also still don't understand why yt recommendations are as poor as they are. I've tried taking the time to try removing certain things from the "recommendation history" (or whatever they call it), flag recommendations I'm not interested in etc and it does improve things a bit but still it recommends things I would never watch in a million years (eg right now I have 4 Joe Rogan recommendations on my homepage even though I've literally never watched any of his things and have zero interest in ever doing so, and click on every one and say not interested etc, for a while it was obsessed with trying to get me to watch MMA content even though I can't bear watching other people hurt each other).

And the whole issue of recommending videos where it knows I've watched the whole thing, I just don't even know where to start.

On search, I wonder if this is deliberate; if they gave you exactly what you want as the top result, you'd click that one and not look any further. But by having to scroll past a few other videos, maybe you'll see another one or two that you also decide to click on, resulting in more overall views.

This is a different strategy to Google web search, where the monetisation occurs on the search results page (via ads there) rather than on click-throughs, so there isn't an incentive to try and get you to click several tangentially related links.

> random junk I have no interest in watching and always regret clicking on

if you regret clicking on it, that means you did click on it and the recommendation did it's job; remember that the job of the recommendation engine is not (directly) to suggest content you'll like, it's to suggest content that will get you to click. Ideally those goals would be aligned, but not necessarily. YouTube is simply incentivised (via ad revenue) to get you to click on as many videos as possible.

At least in my case, it's not that I'm constantly clicking on things that it turns out I dislike. Rather, it's that the few times I have clicked on a recommendation (because hey, maybe they know something I don't, maybe Sonic the Hedgehog actually is a good suggestion for people who liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), I've regretted it.

Right, but my point is that from YouTube's perspective it doesn't "matter" if you like or dislike the video, if they can get you to click. And clearly this strategy works on some people, or they wouldn't be doing it.

So while it may not be overly successful on you (i.e. you only click occasionally), if it works on a significant portion of people it could still be a successful strategy overall.

Sometimes you click even when you don't want to. For example on youtube on ipad it's very difficult to click on the vertical three-dot hamburger icon on a video (that you need to use to tell them you're not interested in a video) without clicking on the video by mistake. The hitbox on that icon is all wrong.