Search is entirely crippled for new stories now. If I saw some breaking news on Twitter I used to pop over to Youtube to find original or better footage than news services were getting, or to get it faster. Impossible via YT's search now, it's just pages and pages of old-media channels with their thoughts on the footage, always clipped down and talked over. Even Twitter seems to do this now, it's becoming harder to find stuff that doesn't have a large slathering of approved views slathered over the top.

Funny that youtube is basically the opposite of google's search which will often only show you results that are relevant to top/recent stories making it very difficult to get results about anything else.

It doesn't even have to be that recent in some cases. Searching for "Sandy Hook Elementary" along with just about any other search term is going to give you a page with results about a shooting that took place a decade ago. Searching for a proper noun when they are the top story of the day is pretty much only going to give you that one story.

I use DDG now but I wish the search tools weren't just last week, last month, last year but greater than a week/month/year so I could discard more recent results. It's quite the puzzle to find ways to remove things, as using the -search-term-I-don't-want or +term-I-do-want is increasingly less reliable, in my experience.

Yeah, google pretty much ignores search modifiers these days and DDG (which I also use) routinely fails to understand what -term means. I still dream of the day we have a search engine that supports regular expressions.

There was one, back before the great clearing of interesting search engines that Google brought about. I forget its name but I used it for code searches.

Yandex.com, my friend. It even returns results from Ulta Cancelled video websites like Bitchute, Rumble and Odyssey.

There is something to be said for a search engine whose interests don't align with, or even better are adversarial to, the prevailing spam sources.

I used to love that about Google News in the early days. A search would give you results from all over the world, with different outlooks and perspectives. I found it enlightening to read against my own selection bias.

Then they removed that value point and aligned what they presented with my existing bias - at which point I stopped using it.

I like Brave's Goggles idea on that front, and for other stuff as well, like curating knowledge domain-specific site boosting lists.

It looks like it's owned by a Russian company. Does that affect what it allows you to see? I notice for instance that a quick search for "War in Ukraine" returns top results from Russian news outlets calling it a "Military Operation".

Of course it affects what you see. Search engines are a form of soft power that states can't afford NOT to influence.

As a user of them, I make sure to use multiple engines (preferably with distinct indices and jurisdictions) when I research something essential that affects my long-term future. This is because I distrust how politics is done (industry lobbying).

Look at how Larry Page disappeared off to Fiji and just dropped out of the tech and business world. That to me says a lot about what's become of Google.

>As a user of them, I make sure to use multiple engines

You may be interested in our alternative YouTube recommendations. Search a channel to find a list of other channels making similar videos. For example, our recommendations for How Money Works include other established econ focused channels like Economics Explained and Money & Macro but also smaller more obscure channels like Wall Street Millennial:

https://channelgalaxy.com/id%3DUCkCGANrihzExmu9QiqZpPlQ/

i mean yeah, yandex is the #1 russian tech company. literally the russian google.

I’ve recently started using yandex lately and have say I also find it refreshing. My favourite is the image search I just find it superior to other search engines.

Better than bing image search, my current go to?

Someone uses Bing?

Bing image search does not suffer from Pinterest-itis as Google Images does.

I absolutely understand the annoyance-factor of "Pinterest-itis" (though it seems that either they've dialled their "you must absolutely register now in order to see anything"-behaviour down a little bit again, or maybe it's just that half-forgotten userscript I installed at some point – either way it's currently not that infuriating for me), but given that e.g. direct image indexing seems almost non-existant for Instagram, being able to stumble across some images from there via the detour of Pinterest is better than nothing I suppose. (It's only infuriating if somebody saved an image to their computer/phone/… and then manually re-uploaded it to Pinterest again, so that the source URL of the image is then missing…)

Likewise if the original image has already disappeared from the net – finding a copy via Pinterest is still better than finding nothing. (Interestingly Bing's search can serve a similar purpose – compared with Google, it feels like Bing is much more reluctant to remove 404'd images from its index again. While those broken results are annoying, too – and unlike Pinterest neither Google nor Bing store (at least publicly) full-resolution copies of those images – at least you can try plugging the preview image into reverse image search and with some luck maybe find an alternative copy of that image that has survived elsewhere.)

And finally, the keywords added by Pinterest are possibly also helpful in making images more discoverable. (This might be no longer that relevant now that Google is also running image recognition on the images it indexes and no longer has to solely rely on the hope that any text near that image or the rare "alt"/"title"-text is actually relevant to the image contents, but it might still help a little.)

If you use DuckDuckGo, you've been successfully tricked into using Bing.

I, too, have been reading HN for more than 3 hours.

Certainly not tricked. They tell you. They also aggregate from many search engines, so it's not just Bing.

I also do. And Yandex, and sometimes Baidu. And when I'm particularly desperate, https://haveibeentrained.com/

Google is resting on its laurels - the perfect recipe for losing hegemony.

Just about anyone not using Google (Startpage) or Brave uses Bing, since it's the source of just about all indie engines' results. And even Brave's image results come from Bing for now.

Bing is also great for searching porn, including an embeeded video player :)

(you might have to change your region to usa first)

Letting Bill Gates know I'm into midget porn doesn't seem like a great idea.

I have enjoyed bing as well but I guess I find myself naturally gravitating to yandex. They are both good imo.

you will watch ze approved media, and you will be happy.

Afair this happened after New Zealand Christchurch shooting. YT was full of POV videos of mentally ill idiot going room to room killing people. As a quick fix/backlash the very next day YT search was totally broken and stayed that way.

Do you ever filter by day, month, week?

I've tried everything I can think of but it seems that news on Youtube is now much like watching television. If there's a trick I don't know it, though it looks like Yandex will have a new customer.

I've had videos not show up in the YouTube search despite the query matching the video title verbatim.

Yep, I confirm that is my experience as well. Google is starting to inch towards the television industry. In all honesty Im not watching any TV these days but i imagine its some advertising and snippets of content. Youtube without membership or ad blockers is just like that if not worse. From how if started to what is has become it’s a long way…

Yup. I now pretty much use YouTube search only to call up a video where I have the YT ID. Everything else is a waste of time, and I just use DDG search if I want to find something without the ID in hand.

How management thinks it is a good idea to make their products useless by letting a bunch of self-aggrandizing "analysts" or marketers or whatever attempt to manipulate their customers/viewers is beyond me. The fact that they are all paid to fork it up so badly is just mindboggling.

Myspace was the place to be until one day it wasn’t. YouTube is a behemoth but it too could fall one day. For now the amount of information it has is just too valuable but it is becoming less enjoyable to use the site all the time. On iOS I don’t have an Adblock and am forced to watch countless ads and then When I watch the ad the video fails to load. So I refresh and sometimes that works sometimes I need to do it several times before the video will play. It is a shame they have gone so downhill over the years for us old enough to remember the beginnings.

Prepend your search with 'intitle:' and you'll get results with the string in the title.

As a regular user, my expectation is that the very first results from a search would be from matching the title string (possibly after trying to match the unique video id seen in the url), only afterwards would results from keyword matching and other such metadata show up.

Maybe I'm out of touch but I don't think this is an unreasonable expectation.

It's not unreasonable, and it's exactly how it used to work until Google started messing around with inserting ads into every aspect of the site (they very much want you to you click on the ad-laden videos you were NOT looking for). They changed the default and relegated it to be a search modifier.

Then we are having to play games (not the fun ones), like we did in the AltaVista days.

For now. If Google is willing to break operators in Search they'll break them everywhere soon enough.

Same

Yes, Youtube litters search results with completely unrelated "recommended videos".

One trick to get rid of them is to select one/any additional search filter (for example select HD only).

It is absolutely ridiculous that you have to do this, but it works for now.

"I get 5-10 results for any given query before Youtube gives up and just offers me recommendations rather than search results."

I search from the command line using a short shell script.^1 Perhaps it depends on the query, but I consistently get more than 5-10 results. For example, I might get 26 reults with the initial query. By continuing the query repeatedly I can usually get over 1000 results total. YouTube search results are delivered as JSON so I wrote some simple, quick and dirty utilities in C to reformat the JSON to TSV with only the details I want. The workflow and example script below use those utilities, i.e., yy059, yy062 and yy064.

      # YouTube search workflow:

      # initial query
      1.sh query > results-file
      yy064 < results-file|yy062 > results.tsv
      # continuation
      1.sh < results-file >> results-file
      yy064 < results-file|yy062 >> results.tsv

1. Example 14-line script using curl

      #!/bin/sh
      HOST=www.youtube.com;
      case $# in :)
      ;;0)
      KEY=AIzaSyAO_FJ2SlqU8Q4STEHLGCilw_Y9_11qcW8;
      MIN=\{\"context\":{\"client\":{\"hl\":\"en-US\",\"gl\":\"US\",\"clientName\":\"MWEB\",\"clientVersion\":\"2.20210916.06.01\"}},\"continuation\":;
      TOKEN=$(yy059|sed -n "s/$/}/;s/\"token\":/$MIN/p"|tail -1);
      URL=https://$HOST/youtubei/v1/search?key=$KEY
      curl --http1.1 -A "" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d "$TOKEN" "$URL"
      ;;*)
      S=$(echo "$@"|sed 's/ /+/g');
      URL=https://$HOST/results?search_query=$S;
      curl --http1.1 -A "" "$URL"
      esac;  

I also have a short script that retrieves all video details for a given YouTube channel. These results are also delivered as JSON. I use search to discover interesting channels, then retrieve the full lists of videos for those channels.

Absolutely agree that YouTube search got neutered.

Here are some uBlock Origin rules to get rid of all that crap in your search results:

  youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-item-section-renderer>#contents>:not(ytd-video-renderer),ytd-secondary-search-container-renderer
  youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-video-renderer:has(.badge:has-text(/new/i))
  youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer ytd-compact-video-renderer:has(.badge:has-text(/new/i))

You are a gentleman and a scholar!

Yup. Search reveals two or three relevant videos but from that point on the search results are indistinguishable from the regular feed. And I get the same video recommended to me all the time. Sometimes back to back!

If you’re not watching ads, you’re worthless to Youtube. Scrolling through search results wouldn’t increase revenue.

YouTube doesn't show you ads if you buy Premium.

You need the YouTube Pro Max+ Platinum bundle to get functional search.

Yeah, search doesn't work at all. It does seem like it pulls up specific channels if you put "ch" in the search text, so I tend to go from there.

Piped, an open-source YouTube frontend, has pretty good search results:

https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped

https://piped.kavin.rocks/

https://piped-material.xn--17b.net/

Does Piped (or the similar Invidious) provide its own search functionality or merely channel YouTube's?

I suspect it might be supplying specific filters (e.g., "intitle", mentioned elsewhere in this thread) to YouTube's query engine.

I'm not sure exactly, but here is a related line of code:

https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/blob/860ca92a4d49a85a3781...

Thanks.

That looks strongly like a simple pass-through.

I feel like I also learned the other day that Google’s search is bad like this too. That it’ll say there’s millions of results and just stop after like 400.

HN's search through Algolia is similar.

An unqualified search reports (at this writing) just north of 30 million results (30,000,229). It will display only 34 pages' worth of results, I believe 1,000.

See: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...> Final page: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=33&prefix=false&q...>

As discussed recently on HN, the match count is useful information even where all matching results are not displayed as it indicates whether or not a query is generic.

Contrast search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> (one result as of this writing).

It's really weird, isn't it, how much Google managed to degrade the one thing it historically did the best?

It's gotten so bad the past couple months. All I get now are maybe 2-3 videos maybe of what I want and everything else is some past shown BS that's not even related or recommendations. They want to become tiktok so bad.

Edit: Add to that the increase in number of ads per video and their length...ugh

It’s crazy how bad it’s getting. If I search a recipe I’ll get 6-10 results then it’s just random other stuff from the same channels.

Kinda think there are more than 10 videos about a major food dish on YT.

Starting to think the backend has a concept of “blessed” channels to surface

I do exactly this. Google and Duckduckgo/Bing all provide better Youtube results than Youtube. I kind of hate the UX of platform now. But there's still so much great content on there from it's better days.

So many smart people there and such an idiotic solution - this whole short sighted, mind narrowing, engagement "boosting" recommendation system must be trained on attention horizon of a fruit fly.

It’s also about engagement and avoiding offending folks via dislikes. IMO dislikes are essential.

It's probably companies advertising their products getting salty their new movie or something got 90% downvotes and YT is all too eager to please its ad overlords.

It started when a Joe Biden speech video got disliked into oblivion. We're talking 2 million+ dislikes.

Why not do things transparently and do weighting by default weight = upvotes - downvote + us cents paid by author, all 3 visible.

> Sadly, it seems that Google has intentionally diminished Youtube's own search function in order to prioritize use of the recommendation system.

That's because recommended videos are more popular, and more popular videos earn them more ad revenue.

That argument makes sense to explain why recommendations are terrible, but not why search is terrible.

YouTube's search has never been as good as Google's for finding videos because Google search knows about the video and also an entire crawled web of links and references.