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Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by dageshi on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @02:51AM (#32328448)
Their search has got pretty bad I've noticed. They've changed it to start showing random shit you might want to watch instead of the thing you actually searched for after the first 10 or so videos. They seem to repeat videos they think you ought to watch quite often in search results as well.

Significant downgrade on what it used to be.

Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by avian on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @03:23AM (#32328639)
Bad search that tries hard not to actually show you search results is another one of those dark trends I see everywhere.

Have you seen Twitter search lately? The search tab in the app doesn't even have a text field visible by default. It's all just unrelated popular garbage. You have to swipe down to reveal the text field where you can enter your search term. Then you get more unrelated garbage in the "top" result tab and you need to go to one of the other tabs to actually see what you were searching for.

Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by coopierez on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @03:53AM (#32328828)
Search on the iOS app store is awful too. You type in the exact name of the app you are looking for and have to scroll through 10-15 vaguely related results before you get to the one you actually want.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by malfist on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @09:31AM (#32331452)
Search on windows is uniquely terrible. Oh, you wanted to launch that app? Let me open Edge with a bing search for that app. I especially love it when I'm trying to launch stellarium and it only suggests "stellarium 200%" unless I delete the "m" from stellarium and then it'll suggest "stellarium", "stellarium 200%" and "stellarium (OpenGL)". Anything else and the only result is "stellarium 200%"

It's total garbage. It's unreliable, sometimes typing out the full name of the app (which kinda defeats the purpose) is the only way to get the app to show in the search results, sometimes NOT typing the full name is the only way to get it to show. Sometimes you get an app, sometimes you get an unrelated app (type is prusa for prusa slicer and you get printers), often times you'll get a random log file with a similar name, or a bing search you certainly don't want.

Hot garbage.

Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by GekkePrutser on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @01:55PM (#32334899)
Doesn't the Windows - R shortcut work anymore? This always worked much better than just opening the start menu and typing because it only looks for apps and doesn't try to 'help' you with other random searches. But I don't use Windows so much lately so it could be they removed that also. They seem to do that with everything that's useful.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by malfist on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @04:43PM (#32336462)
It does, but it has no autocomplete, or suggestions. You have to type everything completely and perfectly for it to work.

If only it worked like command+space on mac.

Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by GekkePrutser on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @09:08PM (#32338257)
Ah that's true but I always type the executable name. E.g. regedit, gpedit, lusrmgr... And it does have a command history that serves as autocomplete as far as I remember, you just have to have used it before.

Spotlight on Mac is indeed far superior. And so is the text launch widget thingy on KDE which I use now.

Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by MiddleEndian on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @09:39AM (#32331521)
App stores are rent-seeking middle men. They provide no value over a simple Google search. In fact they seem deliberately worse, given that you almost always get the correct results at the top. Ironic that this applies to Google's Android app store as well. Their only purpose is to extract cash and control what you run on your own devices without providing value.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by majewsky on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @05:16AM (#32329424)
I usually get the result I want in the second slot. The first slot is always wrong because it's always an ad.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by throwaddzuzxd on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @08:23AM (#32330745)
Ads should never be above perfect matches, this is misleading.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by pbhjpbhj on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @07:27AM (#32330251)
Google Play app store is similar IME; also, it doesn't even let you sort by ratings, like, isn't that the very first thing people want out of a curated store?

It's like Amazon's search, it's ridiculous how bad it is.

A quick glance at these shows Western Capitalism fails to optimise the market and instead optimises profit.

Google's shopping search is definitely not designed to help one shop.

Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by Sharlin on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @09:06AM (#32331175)
The most irritating thing about App Store search is that the text field doesn’t get focus by default. I hope it’s an unintentional mistake but as it’s never been fixed I have my doubts…
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by Noumenon72 on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @02:49PM (#32335413)
Meanwhile the only way I can get to advanced search on the web site is searching for "advanced search" in the regular search box.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by causi on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @07:50AM (#32330440)
Yes. God help you if you're looking for a video not made by a popular youtuber. Saw an amazing fried chicken recipe ten years ago and think you can just scroll the results until you see it? Ha, fat chance. You've got about five results and then nothing but whatever horseshit is trendy today.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by duskwuff on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @09:43AM (#32331570)
Recipes are particularly hopeless. There's a highly formulaic style of recipe video that caught on a year or two ago. Videos built on this formula usually have a title like "I have never eaten such delicious $X", usually with a thumbnail of a liquid being poured over some food, and frequently describe nonsensical or terrible recipes. These videos are useless for actual cooking advice, but somehow get a ton of engagement anyway -- I often get them as recommendations despite not even being interested in cooking videos.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by Kye on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @09:15AM (#32331270)
It's probably still in your watch history unless you clear it.

https://www.youtube.com/feed/history

Of course, the actual history search box is confusingly smaller and off to the side of the much larger search box for all of YouTube.

Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by JKCalhoun on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @08:01AM (#32330548)
Add it to a playlist (or bookmark it). I don't trust the videos to still be up when I might be interested in them so I've become a little bit of a data hoarder.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by causi on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @08:04AM (#32330578)
Yes, it only takes one scroll through your "Liked" videos and noticing how many are gone to become an archivist. The Youtube folder on my media drive is quite large.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by JKCalhoun on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @01:46PM (#32334783)
We reach.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by grepfru_it on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @07:58AM (#32330528)
I started using a bookmark service because of this.

And after I wrote that sentence I found the original video I was thinking about with a google search. Welp.

Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by ugjka on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @08:25AM (#32330760)
Archive everything you like with tools like yt-dlp
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by philistine on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @08:32AM (#32330826)
Its ability to use cookies from your browser is so much better than the original yt-dl it’s not even funny.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by grepfru_it on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @09:32PM (#32338388)
I rip videos but I don’t have a good archival story. Thanks for the yt-dlp tip!
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by causi on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @09:07AM (#32331183)
Does yt-dlp support downloading a whole channel at the highest available resolution when that might be different for every video?
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by ugjka on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @09:18AM (#32331306)
Afaik it downloads the highest quality by default
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by mattanimation on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @09:26AM (#32331392)
ah yes, Mz. Peaches. Best fried chicken there is.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by ralusek on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @02:58AM (#32328495)
I've noticed this with Google, too. Particularly when searching for things in the past, it's like they adamantly don't want 3+ months ago to exist. I now have to archive news articles and the like because I know that I'm going to have an extremely hard time finding them later.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by hattmall on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @03:30AM (#32328679)
If search works too good you are gone too quickly. Amazon figured this out A LOOOONG time ago. If Google makes you rephrase your search 10 times that 10x ads they can show you. If they take those opportunities to also drive you to crap sites that waste time but are heavily monetized by Google ads then that's even more for them. It's no different than grocery stores putting the most commonly purchased items all the way in the back. Want to run in and get milk? Maybe, we have 6 gallons that expire in the next 5 minutes up front, but if you want more you gotta walk past chips, beer, frozen pizzas and a wall of cheese.

It's definitely an accelerating trend though, online search is getting so much worse and even fast food menus are insane now. You need to the app to see anything other than the most profitable combos in many cases.

Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by rightbyte on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @07:47AM (#32330417)
> even fast food menus are insane now

They were really good when the kiosks were new, just like Google was.

I guess PMs hunting local revenue growth but macro loss by spamming upsell and making what you want hard to find is a common problem with these luser uncentric systems.

Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by jhoechtl on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @08:16AM (#32330692)
You nailed it. Couldn't phrase it any better.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by treeman79 on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @06:41AM (#32329951)
It used to be that I could find 5 to 10-year-old articles quickly on Google. Now it’s much harder.

I’ve started keeping a log of every interesting article I find since I know I won’t be able to find it earlier.

I’m also seeing a trend where they try and answer question and will pull from any source. The answer often being wildly wrong.

Saw one of “people also ask” where the source was some dudes fanfiction so the suggested question and answer were complete non sense.

Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by orangepurple on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @03:06AM (#32328540)
Run them through archive.ph for good measure when you see them too
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by GekkePrutser on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @01:57PM (#32334930)
I've found this too. And not only Google but also Bing/DDG. It's really annoying when trying to reference a past event in discussions
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by CommanderData on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @03:43AM (#32328760)
I've stopped using search as it's filled with non relevant content, great job messing with one thing the company was known for, search.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by ur-whale on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @03:39AM (#32328730)
> Their search has got pretty bad I've noticed

YT search was never good (that I can recall).

When I want to find content on YT, I use Google search with a site restrict [1].

Infinitely better.

I invite you all to do the same and forget the YT search box.

[1] something like : life of Albert Einstein site:youtube.com

Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by GekkePrutser on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @01:56PM (#32334922)
Very ironic that you have to use Google to get decent results in YouTube. The knowledge is in the same company just not applied consistently.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by ur-whale on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @03:18PM (#32335711)
As is often forgotten on HN, a company is nothing but a bunch of people, each with their own incentives and political dominions to defend.

We like to think of a company as one entity and assign to it some sort of anthropomorphic aspect, but that's just a dumbed-down simplification our minds like to make to make dealing with the world easier.

Especially for a company as large as Google, were political infighting between product verticals are a documented problem.

In that regard, it is not ironic at all, there is no such thing as consistency in such a large human organization. Hell, even the army is not capable of doing this properly.

Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by greenknight on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @03:54AM (#32328838)
I google the video that i want now, instead of using the youtube search
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by jobigoud on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @07:20AM (#32330204)
Interesting since they are managed by the same company. But I'm not even sure Google is the best search engine for Youtube or video content in general.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by janitor61 on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @10:41AM (#32332403)
Not an expert on this, but I get the feeling they're trying to dissuade people from discovering videos with lower view counts in search results, since these videos are less likely to be cached at the CDN nodes and are more expensive to serve, i.e. budget cuts, like everything else
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by birdyrooster on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @08:12AM (#32330652)
Try yewtu.be it’s like definitely better search on invidious.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by andsoitis on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @09:33AM (#32331466)
> the thing you actually searched for after the first 10 or so videos.

Isn't that a good thing? If you searched for something and the first 10 results aren't a match, why not introduce you to other things (one can experiment with finding how closely related those additional recommendations are, or based on other things you recently enjoyed, etc.)?

Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by dageshi on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @09:37AM (#32331498)
Not really, if what you're looking for is newer or less popular videos on a particular topic because you've already watched the most popular ones.
Re:Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically? by hither_shores on Wednesday August 03, 2022 @10:06AM (#32331842)
> why not introduce you to other things

Because that's not what I told it to do.