youtube is a surprisingly terrible search engine. -...

sam henri gold's posts Post Back to profile

youtube is a surprisingly terrible search engine.
- very limited operators (I can never get ones like `allintitle` to work)
- it shows you random trending chumbox content after, like, ten actual results
- the part that matches the search is super opaque (is it in the tags? transcript? description?)
- the filters are also opaque. “HD” doesn’t mean “just show me HD videos” — it also includes 4K videos

their engagement KPIs are impeding my ability to use a search field like a fucking search field.

Like 1 18 Aug 2023 at 11:53 | Open on hachyderm.io

5 comments

sam henri gold

“use a ublock element filter” that’s not the point, the company that runs the most popular search engine in the world should have this down pat

18 Aug 2023 at 11:54 | Open on hachyderm.io

sam henri gold

i love mastodon because you dorks will let me bitch about search operators at 7 in the morning 💜

18 Aug 2023 at 11:56 | Open on hachyderm.io

Thomas

@samhenrigold the showing random search results makes me so mad every time. I'M DOING IMPORTANT RESEARCH HERE, SHOW ME VIDEOS THAT MATCH THE FREAKING QUERY.

18 Aug 2023 at 12:26 | Open on det.social

Sam Gross

@samhenrigold and none of those tricks work on the TV applications.

18 Aug 2023 at 12:43 | Open on mastodon.social

Григорий Клюшников

The part that drives me absolutely nuts is the fact that it knows that languages are a thing. It would automatically translate *some* video titles with no way to turn that off. Can't fix that by switching the UI to English either, because since I watch videos in both languages, it would start translating Russian to English. Crappily. Also sometimes the subtitles would turn on by themselves. WHY?!?!

18 Aug 2023 at 13:24