Search is the reason I stopped watching youtube, I used to view and discover so many nice stuff in there, tutorials, new hobbies, new music, new creators with different interests, etc but now it's pretty much impossible to find, you are forced to watch the 3 top videos, some 3 ads and then it forces you to watch some other random unrelated crap, it's so annoying and frustrating
It got so bad that even searching the full tittle of the video doesnt show you that video haha
I remember watching video that contains certain word in the title. A minecraft contraption from a small channel (4 videos, 93 subs). I searched that word in the title. But youtube can't find it. Fortunately, I saved the world download that listed in the video with the name of the channel. So I searched the channel name + the word, it still can't find it.
So I searched only the channel name instead, in the search page. It works, and checking their videos, youtube mark one of them as watched. With the exact same title I searched. But it didn't show me in the history search. WTF youtube.
Youtube search is also weird in that it has a hard time finding something directly but will find it and put it it in the suggested videos feed after you have given up. 4 or 5 videos later. (shrugs) hell if I know.
But really, if I ever see a really good video I will download it. I try not to be too much of a digital horder, so it has to be really good. But their search has failed me enough times that it is worth it.
Perhaps this is due to Youtube's alternate titles or A/B/C testing scheme feature?
YT videos have a canonical title, but can have other one assigned randomly (as well as alternate thumbnails). If you're in the B group you might have gotten the B title, but search might only look through canonical titles?
It doesn’t solve all the issues you mention, but YouTube Search Fixer [1] [2] is a browser extension that at least lets you remove irrelevant results, Shorts, live streams, and more from search. It makes results a bit more usable.
Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with YouTube Search Fixer. I’m currently working on https://maxxmod.com, a YouTube-focused browser extension that will include search improvements, so I’ve researched the ecosystem.
Just read the description and OMG soo much crap, thank you so much for this. I guess when I filter these dopamine leeches in my mind I kind of lump them together
Advanced search works. Also auto-skipped sponsored content, thumbnails directly from video content, no google account to use it, subscribe works, no ads and many more...
FreeTube has been extremely slow with loading videos for me. Otherwise it's a killer app and I would use it if it was possible to connect my premium account login to it.
Surely they just want to avoid straining their database so they put some "performance hacks" into their database instructions that they Ab/B-tested to "work" for 90 percent of people or something.
Meanwhile they could have just returned the titles of all your videos you have ever watched as a list and let your computer do the heavey lifting by searching through that text on the frontend only to fetch thumbnails and such for the final matches. I have a webservice with a table of 4000 lines or more and I can search it quasi instantly on my smartphone with a simple Javascript script hooked up to an input field.
There are very efficient ways to block all ads, including YouTube ads. uBlock Origin browser extension is one of them. SponsorBlock browser extension would also skip over in-video ads.
And good luck if the video you're looking for was related to something featured in a news report. No, youtube, I am not searching for 100 different local TV news stories about a viral video, when I type in the title of that viral video.
Search and recommendations is terrible. It’s a classic example of what’s wrong at Google.
I used to love watching recommended videos at the end of a video. They were always focused on some extension of the current video watched. Now it’s slop trying to peddle stuff I don’t watch or YouTube shorts. Same with search. It is so terrible, you get maybe 2-4 relevant results and then it again weights all the YouTube slop.
Nowadays if I want to see videos on a certain topic (not searching for a specific video), I usually ask an AI assistant. It uses web search with multiple related phrases and then picks the relevant ones out. I find this to be very effective right now, but of course in the future they could enshittify these assistants too.
> you are forced to watch the 3 top videos, some 3 ads and then it forces you to watch some other random unrelated crap, it's so annoying and frustrating
Good thing I work on internal infrastructure and not pointing a gun to this guy's head to prevent him from scrolling down past the first three results or refining his query.
There is no "scrolling down past the first 3 results" because everything after that is recommended garbage that's unrelated to the search query. And as they already said, "refining the search query" doesn't work because it wouldn't find the video even if they searched its exact title.
Furthermore, search is fundamentally broken in that it translates your query and then tries to match every title in every language that is vaguely similar. Of course it still only gives you a handful of results before listing off unrelated recommendations in the "search results".
Search used to work great ~10 years ago and I used to find majority of content that way. These days it's so useless I don't really bother trying anymore.
Reading comments like this really shines a light on why Youtube is as bad as it is, I didn't expect the employees to be this out of touch with the product that their company makes.
It's gone massively downhill recently, noticeably so since the ability to sort by upload date was removed from the UI (and then very quickly removed from the API too). That was the final brick that prevented it from being literally unusable, now it's scroll and hope (and give up).
Nah, YouTube is absolutely shoving slop at users. They recently removed some of the search filters such as sorting by date, just to make it a little bit harder to find anything.
The search filters and the user interface in general on YouTube is garbage. you guys need to go back to the drawing board. it really is almost impossible to find a video, you have to sort through hundreds of AI slop clickbait videos in order to get to the one that you're actually interested in finding.
For April Fools Sega released an (actual, real) “Sanic the Hedgeheg” t-shirt and I wanted to see if there was anything about it on YouTube. YouTube assumed I meant “sonic” and it was impossible to correct it and say “no I’m actually searching for this dumb meme”. It just assumes everyone who uses YouTube is really dumb I guess. (I bought the shirt by the way and am excited to get it lol)
The whole Youtube experience has gotten so bad over the years. I love the youtube content, but I wish I didn't have to deal with the UI/UX and recommendations that the YT app forces on me.
Annoying Shorts. I'm trying to keep my watch history clean to "steer" recommendations, but YT keeps adding things to it that I didn't actually watch just because I happened to hover my mouse over a video, etc.
I feel like we have reached a point where Youtube can just remove the search fields and let their algorithms do its thing.
The last time I tried YTs search field was when I was trying to find an older video in my history. Nothing, even if I typed down the exact keywords. Nothing. Luckily, I found it through myactivity.google.com.
Its actually kind of fascinating how a huge enterprise like Youtube can ruin a feature to the point that its actually useless.
What they are good at is pushing irrelevant content everywhere, if I scroll to the bottom of my playlist, there is a suggestions feed. If I search something, after a couple of results, it turns into a suggestion feed. Even my subscribers feed is now a recommendations system at the top instead of just displaying in chronological order.
If it wasn’t for their dominance in the market, I would have left long time ago. But I am stuck there, because the creators are there.
uBlock and Sponsorblock is a bless.
I am curious if there is alternative frontends to youtube that also allows me to sign in with my Googlw account and access all my playlist, likes, watch later etc.
I was hoping to finally see an advanced time filter so I could do something like "over 2 minutes" but it seems you've only got the same ones Youtube has (< 4 minutes, 4-20, and > 20).
If it's an opaqueness restriction with the API or something, I'd like to suggest letting us at least combine the provided ones, so I could do something like (4-20) && (> 20) to get "over 4 minutes" which doesn't exist on Youtube but seems pretty useful.
Another thing that would be useful is filter-by-channel since the search function within Youtube for searching a channel's uploads (using the search button on a channel's page) is a significantly nerfed version of their usual search function.
It allows you to do text to full search on youtube videos. The project obviously didn't index ALL youtube videos subtitles, but it easily index millions of youtube subtitles.
Can anyone describe the problem and use-case in more detail? I've heard this before but it just doesn't resonate at all, and I'm a pretty heavy YouTube user.
I mostly watch videos from my home feed or from channels I subscribe to. When I search it's almost always either:
- film/game trailers I've heard about and want to find (e.g. gta vi trailer)
- videos I've watched before but maybe not liked, with a channel keyword and maybe video keyword (e.g. tom scott bell), or music
- tutorials, where I don't really care about the specific video, I care about the outcome (e.g. how to remove roller blind)
In all of these cases search seems to nail it. The trailer is always the first result (but could be from a variety of sources), the recall on videos I've seen before is basically perfect, and the tutorials get me to the right outcome.
Are people using search for discovery, like putting in a vague topic and trying to explore a topic from search? What specific kinds of queries does it do badly at?
I'm not popular enough to write a post about everything that is wrong with YouTube, from recommending the same few videos over and over again in different "categories" to ALL the results of a search being cringe shorts no one wants to see.
Just asking: Is there an open source project that I can self-host that can organize my current subscriptions into separate groups/categories and make things easy to view/hide/digest?
Many moons ago, I could hover and hide a video I didn't want to see in my feed with a single click. Best UX user feature evar... it was gone in a week or two I feel.
I'm kinda ashamed to say I have multiple youtube accounts to keep my sanity, but yeah.
If anyone has a good solution to YouTube destroying all value of the Subscriptions page I am open ears. Until recently my consumption of YT was basically to go to my subscriptions page and see what new content had been released since I last watched YT.
Search is intentionally bad. You can search for something very generic where there should be millions of videos but only get about one page worth before it pushes shorts and other unrelated algo driven content.
It's always surprised me that Youtube being owned by the worlds leading search company has such awful on-site search. I've always left Youtube and searched for youtube videos via Google search, which brings up better results!
This is much needed. It says so much that "Title includes" is an advanced search .... I really wonder what a basic search is.
My pet peeve: no way to filter on language. Once you hit obscure enough content, you start getting videos back in languages you can't understand. With no way to filter them out. So frustrating. Would be great to add that here. Assuming it even exists in the metadata.
The date filters seem to be ignored for certain search terms and not others. Searching for, say, "dune before:2019-04-05" filters as expected, but searching for current events proximate terms like "iran" or "donald" returns results that disregard the date ceiling completely.
Also, would adding any of the following be possible?
1) Search for specific video quality (standard YouTube search already does this - you can ask for "HD", but would it be possible to search for more specific qualities such as 480p, 720p, etc?)
2) Search for videos only in a specific language
3) Search only for videos that have subtitles in a specific language
4) more detailed length search for the "over 20 minutes" category (e.g. over 40 minutes, over 60 minutes, etc)
All of these are things that I have desperately wished existed over the past few years, and which would have sometimes saved me a lot of time.
Yeah Youtube search is mediocre, though I feel like search has broadly declined across the entire web on all sorts of apps and services I use. Not to mention all the actual "search engines" feeling less and less powerful every year. I don't get it.
I've just stopped using YouTube entirely. I'll watch the odd video that gets linked somewhere else, but I actively avoid going there. And this is as someone who used to pay for YouTube Premium. The site just doesn't value my time, and the company seems to think that I'll just accept watching whatever the algorithms decides I should watch. No thanks.
204 comments
It got so bad that even searching the full tittle of the video doesnt show you that video haha
I remember watching video that contains certain word in the title. A minecraft contraption from a small channel (4 videos, 93 subs). I searched that word in the title. But youtube can't find it. Fortunately, I saved the world download that listed in the video with the name of the channel. So I searched the channel name + the word, it still can't find it.
So I searched only the channel name instead, in the search page. It works, and checking their videos, youtube mark one of them as watched. With the exact same title I searched. But it didn't show me in the history search. WTF youtube.
But really, if I ever see a really good video I will download it. I try not to be too much of a digital horder, so it has to be really good. But their search has failed me enough times that it is worth it.
use the term, let trademark expire
YT videos have a canonical title, but can have other one assigned randomly (as well as alternate thumbnails). If you're in the B group you might have gotten the B title, but search might only look through canonical titles?
There is no way that this billion company isnt/cant be able to build a working search for its video titles&texts.
>I remember watching video that contains certain word in the title
You could use youtube-dl to download the all automatic subtitles those videos and then search.
Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with YouTube Search Fixer. I’m currently working on https://maxxmod.com, a YouTube-focused browser extension that will include search improvements, so I’ve researched the ecosystem.
[1] Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-suite...
[2] Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/search-fixer-for-yo...
Advanced search works. Also auto-skipped sponsored content, thumbnails directly from video content, no google account to use it, subscribe works, no ads and many more...
Meanwhile they could have just returned the titles of all your videos you have ever watched as a list and let your computer do the heavey lifting by searching through that text on the frontend only to fetch thumbnails and such for the final matches. I have a webservice with a table of 4000 lines or more and I can search it quasi instantly on my smartphone with a simple Javascript script hooked up to an input field.
What sort of API do you use to search?
> forced to watch ... 3 ads
There are very efficient ways to block all ads, including YouTube ads. uBlock Origin browser extension is one of them. SponsorBlock browser extension would also skip over in-video ads.
I used to love watching recommended videos at the end of a video. They were always focused on some extension of the current video watched. Now it’s slop trying to peddle stuff I don’t watch or YouTube shorts. Same with search. It is so terrible, you get maybe 2-4 relevant results and then it again weights all the YouTube slop.
> you are forced to watch the 3 top videos, some 3 ads and then it forces you to watch some other random unrelated crap, it's so annoying and frustrating
Brother, you are the one choosing the videos.
Maybe if practical tools such as like-ratios were in place users could sort good content from bad.
Furthermore, search is fundamentally broken in that it translates your query and then tries to match every title in every language that is vaguely similar. Of course it still only gives you a handful of results before listing off unrelated recommendations in the "search results".
Search used to work great ~10 years ago and I used to find majority of content that way. These days it's so useless I don't really bother trying anymore.
Reading comments like this really shines a light on why Youtube is as bad as it is, I didn't expect the employees to be this out of touch with the product that their company makes.
Annoying Shorts. I'm trying to keep my watch history clean to "steer" recommendations, but YT keeps adding things to it that I didn't actually watch just because I happened to hover my mouse over a video, etc.
The last time I tried YTs search field was when I was trying to find an older video in my history. Nothing, even if I typed down the exact keywords. Nothing. Luckily, I found it through myactivity.google.com.
Its actually kind of fascinating how a huge enterprise like Youtube can ruin a feature to the point that its actually useless.
What they are good at is pushing irrelevant content everywhere, if I scroll to the bottom of my playlist, there is a suggestions feed. If I search something, after a couple of results, it turns into a suggestion feed. Even my subscribers feed is now a recommendations system at the top instead of just displaying in chronological order.
If it wasn’t for their dominance in the market, I would have left long time ago. But I am stuck there, because the creators are there.
uBlock and Sponsorblock is a bless.
I am curious if there is alternative frontends to youtube that also allows me to sign in with my Googlw account and access all my playlist, likes, watch later etc.
If it's an opaqueness restriction with the API or something, I'd like to suggest letting us at least combine the provided ones, so I could do something like (4-20) && (> 20) to get "over 4 minutes" which doesn't exist on Youtube but seems pretty useful.
Another thing that would be useful is filter-by-channel since the search function within Youtube for searching a channel's uploads (using the search button on a channel's page) is a significantly nerfed version of their usual search function.
Also, related project: https://filmot.com/search/radiohead%20/1/1?sortField=uploadd...
It allows you to do text to full search on youtube videos. The project obviously didn't index ALL youtube videos subtitles, but it easily index millions of youtube subtitles.
I mostly watch videos from my home feed or from channels I subscribe to. When I search it's almost always either:
- film/game trailers I've heard about and want to find (e.g. gta vi trailer)
- videos I've watched before but maybe not liked, with a channel keyword and maybe video keyword (e.g. tom scott bell), or music
- tutorials, where I don't really care about the specific video, I care about the outcome (e.g. how to remove roller blind)
In all of these cases search seems to nail it. The trailer is always the first result (but could be from a variety of sources), the recall on videos I've seen before is basically perfect, and the tutorials get me to the right outcome.
Are people using search for discovery, like putting in a vague topic and trying to explore a topic from search? What specific kinds of queries does it do badly at?
Many moons ago, I could hover and hide a video I didn't want to see in my feed with a single click. Best UX user feature evar... it was gone in a week or two I feel.
I'm kinda ashamed to say I have multiple youtube accounts to keep my sanity, but yeah.
Or filter out music playlist from video ones.
Or search within transcripts.
It’s peak irony a company owned by the search overlord.
My pet peeve: no way to filter on language. Once you hit obscure enough content, you start getting videos back in languages you can't understand. With no way to filter them out. So frustrating. Would be great to add that here. Assuming it even exists in the metadata.
Also, would adding any of the following be possible?
1) Search for specific video quality (standard YouTube search already does this - you can ask for "HD", but would it be possible to search for more specific qualities such as 480p, 720p, etc?)
2) Search for videos only in a specific language
3) Search only for videos that have subtitles in a specific language
4) more detailed length search for the "over 20 minutes" category (e.g. over 40 minutes, over 60 minutes, etc)
All of these are things that I have desperately wished existed over the past few years, and which would have sometimes saved me a lot of time.
I've noticed that every YouTube video containing one or more emojis in their title are AI generated spam.
If you have thousands of resources in GCP, for example, the search is not super helpful.