It got so bad that even searching the full tittle of the video doesnt show you that video haha

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science

When video first became popular, I got it. Scrapers had very little to go on: title, channel, tags (later), description, likes, dislikes (saldy, no more). There's only so much you can do with that.

But times have changed. You can (within limits) link videos within videos. Google of course also has the entire Web to analyze links to videos.

And then a decade or so ago we started to get automated transcripts, at which point search really should be getting on par with text-based search. Now? You have any number of LLMs you could develop to gather features from videos or could construct higher context than a pure word search.

Also, Google's personalized search should be able to work well for videos. What category does it fit in? What demographics like it? Do people like you like it?

I don't get it.

Ok, as for the tool, does it work with "norms" of Google search? Do you really need boxes for "exact phrase" and "exclude" when you have double quotes and the hypen (respectively) for both of those things? Likewise do "from" and "to" type searches (a la Gmail) work? I ask because a single search box has definite advantages and you can keep adding search criteria as you see fit.

In an ideal world, I'd also like to be able to search for videos I watched and I liked (eg "is:liked", "is:watched") and search channel categories or labels.

before:[date]: Finds videos uploaded before a specific date.

Example: space exploration before:2020-01-01

after:[date]: Finds videos uploaded after a specific date.

Example: tech news after:2024-01-01

To an UI, right?

These changes baffle me. It's not even enshittification because I cannot see any benefit to YouTube at all.

Maybe YouTube search is so bad because videos are poorly optimized for search.

Today most of the emphasis to creators on YouTube is to create content that targets browse traffic and shorts to go viral and get millions of views.

Not so much videos targeting specific user intent with a term that might get 2k views per month if it ranks #1.

Many time I search for a video I know the title of, letter by letter, in quotes, and it does not show up (at least in the first 50 or so results). Sometimes I think the video might have been deleted, only to find it out later in my bookmarks and realizing this is not the case.

Crazy how them being fundamental to what we all know as "the web" nowadays, allows them to get away with being extremely mediocre and oblivious to user's needs.

If people were really looking for exact title search they could write "term".

It is definitely true that youtube's search is optimized for engagement, but going through a separate ui just to search it seems a bit redundant, especially if after I click search I have ti deal with youtube's UI.