youtube's search function is atrocious now
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as a concrete example of YouTube and Google search failing to find content by exact title.
What it is
A short comedic complaint by ProZD about YouTube search failing to surface his own video even when searching its exact title. It illustrates how poor search results have become.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2024 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Cites johnfernow · 2024-02 · on “YouTube dominates TV streaming in US, per Nielsen's latest report”
Here's the video for anyone curious: [this video] tl;dw: First, he searches the exact name of the video on YouTube: it shows a fan-made animated skit of it, the wrong videos but from the right channel, and several re-uploads with only a few hundred views. Second, he adds the channel name before the name of the video in the search bar. Same results. Third, he tries searching for a famous line from the video: still no luck. Finally, he sorts by view count and it shows up, but still not as the first result. Is this some obscure video from some obscure channel? Nope, the video has 15 million views from a channel with 3.91 million subscribers that uploads videos regularly. He has a verified account wh
Cites jerlam · 2024-10 · on “Cannot Search for Joe Rogan Trump Interview on YouTube”
Sounds similar to what happened with ProZD's video which wasn't political or controversial: [this video] follow up - [LINK] It was flagged internally as high-risk and removed from the search rankings.
Critical ForHackernews · 2024-07 · on “Google dropping continuous scroll in search results”
What? Where do you come up with this? Expecting to see the original video by the creator when you search for the exact title of that video , verbatim, is not a self-nullifying mysterious goal. Google fails at this (deliberately, I can only assume): [this video]