nevernothingShow HN: YouTube search barely works, I made a search form with advanced filters
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)
Just put the term in quotes "sanic the hedgeheg" ignore the suggestions and press enter to see the real results.
Google no longer cares much about quotes. Sometimes it’ll take them seriously and sometimes not.
For instance, searching the quoted (random phrase) "pants butler" produces first page results like:
"pants,” Butler" and "pants...Butler" and "Pants - Butler's"
Second page loses it entirely, with results like "BUTLER SVC Green Back Country Cargo Pants" and another that seemingly lacks "butler" anywhere on the page.
I have also noticed this. Many other search engines have started doing it too.
If I had to guess, they are probably deferring to autocorrect if a quoted search doesn’t appear often enough to be notable and the distance to existing common tokens is small. This really sucks, because it means that you can’t search for uncommon things that are named similarly to common terms. Once upon a time it wasn’t like this.
A similar problem comes up if you want to clarify a common search with an uncommon term. Once upon a time you could quote the uncommon term or prefix it with a plus to force a narrowing of the results. Now that hardly ever works, and instead they just ignore your extra term.
Sometimes the search engine “AI assistants” can find these things if you prompt correctly, which is maybe the most useful application of AI that I’ve found. But even then they often don’t seem to search that deeply, and sometimes they will just assume that your query is invalid and gaslight you.
I was curious after reading your comment and searched for sanic meme tshirt in the YouTube app. One result looked highly relevant, posted 4 days ago. It was a short, not a normal video mind you. Titled Official “Sanic” merchandise and having a picture of sanic and some dude’s face. Most of the rest of the results were from different dates, several ranging to years ago. But a lot of those other ones seemed to be about meme sanic as well at least.
I didn’t click on any of them to verify, lest YouTube decides that it should replace my whole YouTube home page with sonic fandom and sanic memes :P
I just put this into YouTube search and got results that contraindicate your claim¹:
> "sanic" the hedgehog
The quotes seem to shut down autocorrect
1: there's nothing that I see about the T-shirt, but the first result is titled "Sanic DA hedgeh0g". I will not be looking at what this video is. Several other results also include the word "sanic" in relation to the hedgehog.
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
What got me really mad is searching your own history. There's this "search watch history" on the https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
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.
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.
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.
They see those hovers as attention. And they likely calculate how long you linger. The lingering tells them a lot when you are infinite scrolling on other platforms.
They would love to have full on eye tracking. So the next best thing is a cursor. (Even though I’d agreed with anyone who says it’s a poor signal.)
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.
Potentially unpopular idea:
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.