The thing is, UA-cam isn't going anywhere because it still doesn't have any good competitors to scare them into making a better product, and I don't know if they ever will
This frustrates me to no end, I used to look up obscure video game music to use in my d&d games and now its always the same 10 results, followed by "You migh also like" videos that arent even music, its atrocious
There's a workaround for it: type "before:2025" (without quotes, and with a space after) at the start of your search. Limiting your search to results uploaded before a certain year gives a proper list of search results rather than four results and then "you might also like" -- and, by specifying a year in the _future_ recent videos will show up. It's beyond absurd that this is necessary, though.
The instant UA-cam added the "People also watched" section to search results is when I knew this website was capitalizing on addiction marketing to the point of being useless. I don't want my search to bombard me with random nonsense, I want to find what I'm looking for.
Agreed. Apart from its functionality being abysmal to begin with, It's annoying that the initial search results are cluttered with unrelated recommendations instead of focusing on what you're actually searching for, defeating the main purpose of a search function...
I was looking into the nba one time and I got a huge spoiler for god of war ragnarok because of the "people also watch" feature like what? that's two worlds different
Yes! It’s creeped me out multiple times and just had me nope tf out of scrolling through video inspos, because suddenly I was in a completely different area of YT.
How has anybody who works at UA-cam ever thought that was a good feature? It throws me into fits of rage when I am searching for something and I have to scroll past a bunch of random crap that explicitly isn't what I am looking for. Everybody seems to understand that it's annoying. I've never seen anybody claim they like this behavior. Somebody important at UA-cam is just like, "No, we've chosen to be worse. And no matter how often we make changes to things, we will never change this one thing everybody hates."
Not just that, I fucking hate when the search results include unrelated popular NSFW videos. Especially a couple years ago, *before I was 18.* Do better, UA-cam. This is disgusting.
I too am getting very annoyed with the increase in "Watch Again" videos in my feed/sidebar. Yes it's one thing to watch JUST my subscription, but sometimes I do want to watch something new or from outside my subs. And seeing a host of videos I either JUST watched, "partially watched but decided it wasn't my thing, but youtube things I didn't finish it and I should", or "videos I watched ages ago and should probably rewatch" annoys the living hell out of me........ This place is going to hell.
Even worse is that, the further down you go, UA-cam will actually start LOOPING search results that you just looked at near the top, so instead of coming to more obscure videos related to your topic, you just get the exact same results all over again, plus random recommendations from unrelated videos you watched like four days ago!
This is so frustrating when I am trying to find a video! It just keeps looping! Sometimes it feels like I can go by the same unrelated video five times before I actually find what I’m looking for. It also feels like the further you go the less new stuff you see and more of is just the some unrelated stuff that you’ve already seen!
4 days... try videos you watched 4 years ago,, and basing suggestions on that... and suggesting something that you have spent a year telling google explicitly that I Do NOT LIKE... Yet next search... FISHING... (Or base ball, or music... what ever it was that month I spent days saying to every suggestion I DON'T LIKE... I spend more time telling UA-cam to FO than I do watching videos (or adds)... so neither of us win... and I have a new addiction.
I knew it was popular but seeing that it has 15M views... why would reuploads or completely different/unrelated videos with like a couple hundred views EVER be considered more "relevant" than a 15M view video with the exact phrase you're searching as its title???
I remember when Google's search algorithm was so good it gave me the names of songs I only had a vague idea of what the lyrics were, and I didn't even have to use double quotes. That's because it used to give you the results that were closest to your exact wording instead of "giving up" at the second result, not to mention it used to allow you to see EVERY result it could find on the web, which sometimes was extremely useful. Many people have mentioned before how a result on, say, page 15 was exactly what they were looking for. This was back in 2009 or so. Now, changing the algorithm a little so it tries to fix your typos, or include closely related words that might be related to your search if the results would be few otherwise, that makes sense. But now it's all about how they can distract you so you can see more ads; the results you get often have """related""" terms that have absolutely NOTHING to do with the words you used.
related to how they automatically assume you made a typo is how it just seems to completely ignore a large swathe of symbols in your search? like i’ll search up “% symbol” or something similar and it’ll give me results like i just searched “symbol”, absolutely mental. great job guys
@@bigfongz WHY IS THIS SO ACCURATE I tried to search " :troll: " and it changed it to "troll" (which also caused it to show Trolls (the movie) related stuff)
You know what happened. Money and greed happened. We all took their free search for granted and now they just sell you answers no matter what you asked. Try to google a computer problem and low and behold the complete first page will be scam sites who just bought their way to front of the line. It's not about solving it's about getting your money. I use yandex and bing more often. Also Kagi but it's paid, but it is what google use to be so maybe worth it.
i looked up a type of perspective but it gave me shitty pictures of side profiles that were nowhere near to what i searched, i NEED good results for ART
I cannot search anything, especially related to a service like healthcare or home improvement, without having to use advanced search to exlcude all the unrelated buzzwords google thinks I want to see. It's driving me crazy when I just need a simple answer to a question and I cannot find it anymore
i hate shorts so much man. literally downloaded a 3rd party youtube client to block them on the entire app, only stopped using it cus the app stopped getting updates and wouldnt connect to youtubes servers anymore
The worst part is that it's usually something gross or disturbing. I once searched up a video of Vault 88 (From Fallout 4) to look up settlement building tutorials, and I kid you not, first search result was a sex toy. I don't even watch pron so I don't know why it's targeting me with this gross stuff. At least it's not as bad as when I typed "Cute dog videos" and UA-cam showed a thumbnail of a bleeding dog.
Things I hate about the youtube search: 1. Exactly what you mentioned. 2. The sheer amount of non-related content being stuffed in my face every time I look something up. 3. Said non-related content LIMITING THE ACTUAL SEARCH TO JUST A FEW RELEVANT RESULTS
Dude whenever I search for literally anything I get more videos unrelated to my search that are simply just recommended to me than videos related to my actual search. It's so annoying, especially because UA-cam's recommended feature is also broken and it doesn't know what I want.
Additionally frustrating because those unrelated (and often weirdly upsetting?) video suggestions don't have ANY option to select "I'm not interested" or "stop showing me this" at all.
I hate when I'm looking up literally anything and it's like "Heyyyy man, you want some p**n?" And I'm like "no??? I wanted some game theory 'WOW could've prevented covid' you know, the thing i typed"
@@knighter1209I thought the recommendations were shite too, until a started getting videos like “screaming sausages” and “Chinese Bluetooth lady”. Now I think UA-cam knows me too well 🥲
It actually makes me sad to see the state UA-cam is in right now. I grew up with UA-cam as far back as 2009 and I cannot recall a time it was EVER this atrocious. ): It's such a pain to use anymore. The search function is worse, every corner of the platform is overloaded, it's not user-friendly, and they let LITERALLY ANYONE show ads so there is literal p*rn being shown to people via ads. Worse still is that plenty of kids use regular UA-cam, and p*rn addiction is extremely easy to obtain at a young age, that's why professionals strongly urge parents to monitor their children's used websites and stuff. Now kids are getting easy access to p*rn because of these ads showing up, advertising their websites and crap... it's awful. I just wish we had the ads from 2013 again. Those PooPouri ads were hilarious, I remember back in that day everyone would be talking about it! UA-cam ads used to be treated as actual commercials, but they still wanted to grab your interest to keep you entertained since you'd be forced to watch the ad. Now it's just clickbait bullshit and corporate nothingness (and p*rn). So a lot of users utilize ad blocking extensions to keep themselves sane... which UA-cam hates, and that's why they're ruining their platform. There is literal proof that UA-cam is slowing down their website for people who are using ad blockers, regardless of whether or not they have Premium; and even more recently, they are purposefully sabotaging the search results for ad blocker users. Again, there is proof of this happening (I've watched people turn their ad blocker on, refresh, bad results / turn ad blocker off, refresh, good results). Nothing hurts more than watching UA-cam become a successful platform where future stars would get their start, to a platform that cares more about their p*rn ad money than their consumers. Their rise and fall was so drastic, it would look like a mountain when graphed...
Amazing. Google, the company that everyone started using because they had the best search engine in the business, has slowly obliterated the usefulness of the search function in every product they own.
This has gotten to the point where if I want to watch a video I've seen before, I just search my watch history. I don't waste my time with the """search""" function anymore.
@@marcd7332 Or install a plugin. I have something like four or five of those just to make youtube bearable. Fix the search, no short, no mainstream media, return the dislike button, etc.
They really should incorporate a search bar over the watch history and in some video lists. It really gets confusing sometimes, scrolling and scrolling isn't the best sometimes, the page don't charges and Ctrl+F could not get what you are searching for. Even the tags should be consistent and functional. If someone has a project over this thing, please let me know or just try to get someone to get coverage on that, thanks
The worst thing is how they shove completely unrelated videos in the search results. Really gross or triggering stuff like blackheads being removed or a clickbaity title about someone dying. They don't even give you the option to block those videos like you can in the homepage.
Gaaaaaaah I wish there was a way to block channels from search results. I hate hate hate hate hate hate haaaaate it when I'm looking up a show or game and all that shows up is complaint videos from culture warriors.
This doesn't even get into the awful thing where you scroll for a bit, and then UA-cam decides to show you unrelated videos you might want to watch. It makes utterly no sense
How about the gore-bait videos, with titles like "Don't Look Away Challenge" or just something about some disgusting medical issue with awful bodily effects. Yeah, I still get those even when I'm trying to find a piece of classical music (I didn't realize symphonies come with rotting nails and trypophobic diseases!) 🤮
Its all about not quite giving you what you want, so you stay on the platform longer and watch more vids and more ads as a result. The entire platform is designed to suck up your attention and time and turn you into an ad watching consumerist robot. Think about it for a bit and you'll start seeing it
if i had to take a guess as to why its prioritizing those, its probably an oversight in trying to make smaller channels more visible. with broader topics like specific video games, that's fine, but in a case like this, the "smaller channels" are just reuploaders
@@yeahboiii6351 That's quite the oversight. Small channels shouldn't be pushed by horrible search results. If they want to promote them they should be shown in the feed.
This hurts YT and Google in the long run. YT feels much smaller to me now than it did a decade ago because I engage less with the interfaces (search and the front page) that surface new content and creators, and instead just use my subscription page for the channels that I already know.
Don't forget the opposite problem many of us deal with: when I first uploaded my video essay, it was literally unsearchable. I could type in exactly the title and it would never at any point come up in a search. It had to get a thousand views before the algorithm acknowledged its existence, and tens of thousands before it could be searched in unrelated terms. The truth, which I can see in my video recs, is that the algorithm doesn't really want people searching at all. It just wants to constantly have things to recommend to keep you addicted. If it could help you find the one specific thing you wanted, then you might be satisfied with youtube and stop watching it! Can't have that!
Gods, I hate how accurate that assessment is. But that's exactly why they've done shit like this to their platform. To them, it's no bug, it's no new flaw that has to be addressed. It's a feature.
That's the real reason there. It's not in their interest to give you what you want. They only care about extracting the maximum amount of profit, so this behaviour is by design. It's not like we have a choice, there is no competing video platform anywhere near as popular.
And the future they are aiming for is UA-cam Shorts being the dominate format. I won't be surprised of they "got rid" of basic free YT and you were forced to use YT Shorts and if you wanted to see your favorite content creator, then YOU WILL HAVE TO buy YT Premium to watch them
Thank you for saying that - this makes me feel better about my feeling that no amount of curation makes youtube more useable - it's designed to be a time suck full stop
Kinda reminds me of how free live service games operate. The more time you spend playing the more money you might be spending - or in UA-cam's case, the more ads you might be watching.
"We've looked at what you searched for. He's some stuff other people who searched for vaguely similar things wound up watching." is the most useless way to implement a search function. And it's *so* much harder to implement than the dumb search engine that does what the user expects and wants.
I have literally never clicked on anything in that section. Searching something is supposed to be about user choice. I feel like more and more I'm just being told what I "should" watch.
My feed occasionally gets filled with Indian celebrity news. The only reason I can think of for that happening is that I might have recently watched a tech video by an Indian guy, so now UA-cam thinks I'm interested in Bollywood crap. I have a long list of Indian gossip channels that I've blocked.
That's not what they're doing. It's "here's what we think will lead to you watching the maximum amount of ads." That's why there's so much rage bait, because lots of people will spend hours making themselves mad.
it used to be so damn simple. here is a list of hits, in descending order, from most relevant/most views to least views. yeah, it meant that smaller content got swept under the bus, but you know what? maybe the "explore" section of youtube should stay *separate* from the *SEARCH* function!
to get rid of the "people also watched" or "you may also like" put in "Before:2025" and put quotes around words/sentences to look for a specific thing/phrase
UA-cam Search along with Google Search has gotten so bad lately. In the past they used to group the most relevant results at the top. For example if you search for Witcher 3 Guide, the results from GameFAQs, Fextralife, Fandom, Game Pressure, would all be grouped together at the top. Today they're sorted all over the place and there's tons of irrelevant results in between them. Game Pressure would be on the 10th page and tons of irrelevant results would be above it.
EXACTLY my problem. I once tried searching “in defense of American city design” and I just got the same old Urbanism UA-camrs talking about how great bike lanes and public transit are and how awful American city design is, instead of, you know, even a single video presenting the counterargument. I’m quite sure those videos exist. If only there were a way for me to search for them!
Another thing I haven't seen mentioned in the comments yet: When I'm searching for videos of animals, I guarantee I do not want videos of animals being killed, tortured, or eaten alive, but those are always what youtube puts near the top.
You've clicked them once before thats the reason its testing you with them for vaguely unrelated stuff. I just tested with somebody else, scrolled for 400ish videos with the search string that they say brought animal gore. For me, "cute deer" gave mostly cute deer or other animal videos. In about 400 videos not one was gore like they said.
@supremebuffalo6322 no, I've never clicked on videos like that and I still get like dr pimple popper or animal abuse videos and I'm just so shocked???? It's actually revolting and makes me close out of youtube because I'm just trying to search something!
Same. Made a search for a video of a cat farting. Got recommended a content farm full of animals either dying of mortal injuries, or dying from indescribably horrific birth defects (all of which are shown in the thumbnails they recommended). Pretty muck every video had the same generic 2005 adult-alternative sounding song with the same 2 second clip of a young asian woman with a crying filter attached.
Absolutely true of Google as well. you can literally set it to verbatim mode, put your search in quotes, and still not get what you're trying to search for because it picked one word in the search to focus on.
They also removed all the useful operators. Used to be able to just put -websitefullofspamresults and it would stop showing you that website in your results. Only search engine I've found that retains that functionality is DuckDuckGo which has its own weaknesses
I love when I search '"median" income in [blank]' or something like that with median in quotes, and the search is like, "Here are some averages". That is not what median is! Median and mean are different things! That's why I put the quotes there!
UA-cam is completely broken now. Loads of my recommended is now full of content UA-cam has decided I should want to watch that are nothing like anything I'm interested in or have ever watched before. It doesn't matter how much I say "not interested", it just keeps coming. It even keeps recommending channels after I say "don't recommend channel".
I don't think I've ever voluntarily watched a reaction video & I've definitely never Liked one, yet they're suggested above the original videos. Then there's the "For You" which are somehow 50% for me & 50% the diametric opposite of anything I'd want to watch. "Not Interested" downranks whole categories rather than specific topics, yet the absolute worst topics just get suggested anyway
@@prophetzarquon1922 every time I see any reaction video I instantly click 'not interested'. UA-cam loves recommending those... Out of principle I will never watch one and block channels that mainly do reaction content...
oh god, i hate this. There is so much weak content on yt, and channels full of spoilers in the title, but for some reason YT just pushes it onto me a few weeks after i "do not recommend the channel", like "oh I'm sure you are no longer angy at that vid, let's forget your past grudge toward it, and maybe watch it INSTEAD OF LITERALLY MILLIONS OF OTHER VIDS"
Huh. As someone who actually likes my home page and, as i just looked right now, all of the videos recommended are actually pretty accurate and stuff id watch, i wonder what i did differently, or maybe what you guys did differently. I genuinely have no complaints about my home page, i do agree with complaints on the search results tho
UA-cam search went from being able to give you results for songs just based on how it sounds in your head (plin plin plon, the Dark Souls Lord of Cinder song is the most popular example and one of the few that still works) to giving results completely and absolutely unrelated to anything you searched for whilst simultaneously feeding you with brain rot shorts and click-bait horny thumbnails on the side.
Right?! That’s my problem. I’ve been trying to find a song for days based off of the lyrics because it was in an advertisement, and I didn’t know the title, and it never shows me anything related to it. All it does is pulls up other songs that don’t even have the same lyrics in it. I’ve spent over an hour trying to find it.
@@arsonistnpc I finally found it after days of searching, but the lyrics I was typing in were, you’ve been acting so mysterious. You never thought I’d go, but do you now? You never took me seriously. It was driving me crazy that I couldn’t find it.
Ugh, those gross thumbnails are the worst. I was looking for War of the Worlds music. Why are they showing a woman's private parts? How are they even allowed on UA-cam?
I'm scared of scrolling down the search page because weird videos that are totally unrelated to what I'm searching keep appearing. Like nasty stuff, and no, it has nothing to do with my search history, I've seen so many people complain about these creepy videos
After you search, press the filter button at the top right and press "type:video" and it will remove all the extra recommendations. It won't remove ads though.
The worst thing is: the "You might also like" section followed by a "People also watched" section that are full of animated vore porn and nasty skin conditions and all kinds of mega cursed content that have nothing to do with your original normie search of kittens and music videos. And you can't turn this off either!
YES!! i've seen some of the most grotesque and horrifying thumbnails. and you cant even tell youtube to not recommend the channel!!! those videos they list don't have the option 😢
Dawg if that’s in the “you might also like” section then that’s your own fault Edit: it’s also based on your browser history because if you use safari or google then google has your data. My recommendations are fine, y’all are the creeps.
What!? I didn’t realize it was this bad! It’s also annoying that when you search something, it shows about 7 related videos to your search, and then throws a bunch of random videos in “for you” and “people also watched” categories 🤦🏻♂️
what's weird is uh, yeah this is just proZD and complaining UA-cam is removing him from relevancy bc.. 🤔 well it isn't bc they wanna promote him it seems. 🤷🏻♀️ can't argue with UA-cam literally showing him they don't want ppl to find his content
It doesn't always show up for some gods-forsaken reason, but I've found a way around that. If you get the option at the top to search for videos, playlists, etc., select "Videos" and it should only show results related to the search.
@@TemmiePlays it's not an issue specific to him, it's the fact that whe you search anything you get a bunch of unrelated crap and can't find content that you're actually looking for.
I don't know how much it improves search accuracy, but depending on browser there are some extensions that remove the For You videos and other junk results. A while ago I got annoyed enough to install one, so maybe you might want to look into that too. It really helps!
On the contrary. I think they are making these changes to complete with tiktok (they want to be more algorithmic driven) and failing to recognize that many of their viewers are coming here bc we are not interested in toktok and want something different out of the platform.
So glad someone else has mentioned this. Among the huge amount of criticism people have for UA-cam I have never seen this talked about before. Also when I search for a video on UA-cam it only gives me like 4 search results and the rest is more “recommended for you!” and “people who watched x also watched these:”. So annoying
Two things I really hate about searching on YT are: 1) Forcing completely irrelevant rage-bait videos, usually from News channels 2) Specific keyword search leads to actual NSFW material They really should fix this but of course they won't.
Oh, so I'm not the only one who gets reccomended those ragebait channels screaming about how "woke" everything is? I feel I've been getting recommended a few of them a week for months now it feels like. I don't watch anything like that on UA-cam.
If I recall correctly this happens because the algorithm they use has determined that your video had reached peak viewership and is instead recommending videos it determined has more potential to get clicks
The worst is when you search for something and then there are *maybe* three videos that fit the search criteria, followed by 'you might like' and 'watch again' then maybe another couple of relevant videos before another 'people also watched' and then 'people also search for'... JUST GIVE ME VIDEOS FOR WHAT I'VE SEARCHED FOR! If I want a recommended video I'll use either the home page or the side bar of another video (which btw used to be related videos but are now just the same videos you get on the home page)
omg I thought the side bar was simply just me. I gaslit myself into thinking YT would never make such a silly and awful change. I despise it. sometimes I’ll be watching a series and the next episode won’t show up on the side and I have to search for it. whyyyy? yet yk what I do get? a completely UNRELATED video (unrelated in the sense I’ve NEVER shown interest to anything close to the topic) from a channel with 2 subscribers and the video will have 356 views. it’s cool I’m being shown low-count videos but they’re not made for me.
I used to use UA-cam heavily for music discovery. The classical music I listen to used to not have ads ( or just 1 in the beginning) and other songs by the composer or in the genre would show up in the side. It's useless now. You will get 12 ads in the middle of a porce with 1k views and random popular videos will be in the side. Who wants that? Why not have different places for different things?
I so feel that about the side bar, I used to find pretty much all the music I liked through UA-cam, but today that wouldn't be possible. So iirc they wanted to tweak the algorithm so that it wouldn't lead people down political extremist rabbit holes anymore... but who'd have thought that the way to do that is by just making the algorithm completely useless.
Not just that, but every time I search something up, I get two actual videos related to what I want then a vomit of youtube shorts and then a random section for "recommended" but completely unrelated videos
There shouldn't have to be a fix in the first place, but if you want to not have to scroll through "related" or "recommended" videos, you have to use the filter and click "videos". Then you'll just see stuff based on your search
I tried it too, same results. What grinds my gears is the stupid "People also watched" section. Like dude, I can't even get the video I want to watch, why do I care what other people are watching??
copy pasting this advice everywhere in the comments: Try adding before:[current year + 1] at the end of the search to eliminate the "for you" and "people also watched" garbage. For example: since the year that this comment is written is 2024, type in before:2025 it may not completely fix the search function, but the results will be better.
Same, I grew up as a 2000s kid and the problem for us was that WE HAD TOO MANY OPTIONS!!!! But we were able to search for what we wanted and find what we were looking for. More reasons why I think the Y2K Internet/UA-cam was better to what we have now and it all went down hill around the mid-2010s IMO.
I blame that on companies being more interested in advertising shit to you that you "might" like instead of just giving you what you searched for. The fact that the two or three top results in Google searches are sponsored pages that might not even be that relevant but are still prioritized over what you wanted should say a lot about where their priorities lie (hint: it's not the users, and it hasn't been in a long time.)
@@quinnjohnson9750 Y2K internet was 100% better than what we have now in terms of structure (of course, level of technology available is way better now). Social media is toxic & having an internet community structured around forums for specific interests, instead of catch-all social media platforms, was SO much better.
@@quinnjohnson9750 Bout the same time that stuff like cable and netflix all started to collectively shit themselves. Once they realized how profitable it was to produce dog shit content loaded with ads it was end-game. Same exact story with video games, all collectively got focused on monetization and online live-service games that will never hold together a community long term. Everything is to squeeze out gains now and it leaves a product that nobody even wants. They're playing themselves in the long run though.
It's surreal to me that YT is failing on such a large, profound frontier like this when once upon a time I could type lyrics of a song completely incorrect and still get the result I wanted. From predatory, agressive and borderline (if not full on) NSFW advertisement to search function issues and unrelated searches, it's sad to see this platform fall so far. YT needs to get it's shit together, because tacky bandaid fixes don't stop a sinking ship.
For real. I had just said this to someone else, but I was a big user of UA-cam from as far back as 2009 (this account I had made in 2013). I watched UA-cam go from a kind-of-cool video sharing website where people posted whatever they wanted, to being a content-oriented platform, to being a successful platform that launched so many careers, to kind-of-plateauing, to becoming generally disliked, to showing godawful obtrusive ads, to showing LITERAL P*RN ADS, to purposefully sabotaging the website for people who use ad blockers in order to avoid said ads (and also horror ads, I hate those and they're NEVER SKIPPABLE). Watching UA-cam's rise and fall is probably one of the saddest things I've grown up with aside from like, trauma I guess lol. But seriously, I miss when UA-cam tried to be good! Like they actually used to TRY to make the website better, can you believe it? And now they're actively trying to push away hundreds of thousands of users just because we hate their ads! Wtf!
It's because it's profitable for UA-cam to do this. UA-cam is tweaked to maximise time on platform so that they can extract the maximum amount of surplus value from the viewers. Letting you search and find the one specific video you want turns out to not be the best way to achieve that goal. You're not supposed to be satisfied and happy, you're supposed to be stuck. UA-cam and similar platforms have all realised that it's more important to be able to change what you want in order to keep you interested and "hooked" than it is to simply give you what you want and then let you go about your day. If you search for "techno feudalism" you'll find some good analysis of this modern cloud platform landscape by the economist Yanis Varoufakis.
@@imEden0yeeeaaaah no. 1. Monopolys are so illegal that not even disney is able to get past that law yet. 2. Even the greatest boat can still sink if the captain is enough of a dumbass. Sadly NOTHING is idiot proof.
You know what's ALSO insane? When I'm watching a numbered series on a channel and UA-cam just... forgets the number 7 exists and I have to search for 15 minutes to find part 7 if I'm not on a playlist.
YES this!! I love when I’m on part 8 of a series and UA-cam recommends part 10 (instead of part 9) AND part 65, conveniently spoiling the story twist with the thumbnail :))
I've noticed this for ages now. I don't search for videos anymore. I search for channels and then have to find the video there. I also had no idea the filter existed. I hate it so much. I hope this gets more views and UA-cam does something to fix their search function.
being a Google company, YT probably has the same mind virus as their A.I. products... that made news yesterday, when asked for pictures of U.S. founding fathers... making their search results a hot pile of unusable garbage
I knew the filters were there but they’re useless if you’re looking for something new- like if I’m looking off a certain sort of video on a certain subject none of those filters are useful to me I fucking hate it 😓😓😓
You can block those unrelated sections with the Ublock extension, right click and press "block element" and it does it for all of those unrelated sections everytime I do searches. Still, I wish I did not have to use extensions to bring back things we used to get by default!
It feels like every page on UA-cam is slowly becoming the home page. The search results give you videos related to what you've already watched or what other people look at. The sidebar recommendations are either full of videos from channels you're subscribed to or random stuff instead of something related to what you're watching. At some point, UA-cam must have calculated they could increase their revenues by breaking their own site. And the home page itself is a lot more static and inflexible than it used to be. Refreshing used to give a completely new set of videos, now it does squat.
I don't even have a home page feed; since they tied the recommendations to the watch history, it gives me zero videos. It used to be random, and it was kind of fun. But now it's useless!
It feels like they don't trust their users to figure out how to use the site. If I want to see channels I'm subbed to, I'll go to my subscriptions page. I don't need to see them in the search results when I'm trying to find one specific video from a channel I'll never watch again.
even individual playlist pages too! they put a bunch of random videos underneath the ones actually in the playlist, the first time I saw it I was like how did these get in here?? and they load in before most of the playlist does
yeah I've noticed this for a while, really sucks they try to make it all algorithm based and 'for you'. If I wanted curated content I WOULD STAY ON THE HOME PAGE!
It's not even curated. I'm almost never logged in, and youtube still does this. It's recent - I noticed it 1-2 years ago when I couldn't find a ton of Gianni Matragrano videos anymore (example: search "he's got a tummy ache"). Only google works for these, which is ironic bc they're owned by the same company 💀
is anyone else getting the click baiting videos like "this video will play after 3 ads"? There are so many of those content farms that just buy channels to post that.
Used to be able to find what I actually look for, not push ecommerce sites on me for the equivalent of 3 to 5 pages. Yeah, the idiots resorted to endless scroll now. At least not like FB where it shows almost nothing relevant to what I searched. Only shows my wall posts or articles I commented on. 😂
@@iristigerlilyDanny got traumatized by trypophobia to the point where she had to write endo of a character using those images as a basis to cope. And this is before they saw the Justice League issue that didn't show inside a character... now endo is ruining their life too.
There are current inquests into the responsibility of social media sites to curate their content and protect their users from such things, given the cases of these videos inspiring people to hurt others or themselves. Please try and contact any news agencies, legal connections, or local politicians about this issue. This is a global issue about exposing millions of unsupervised children to incredibly harmful content, said content often being of severe crimes that are unreported, and said content encouraging more similar acts to occur. This is a serious issue, and we should treat it as one.
I'm happy that a bigger UA-camr is talking about this. Because I've been telling people that it's extremely hard to grow as a small channel because you could type in the name of your video verbatim and not find it. Just like you showed, even if you type in your username.
This isn't new, but it does seem to be getting worse. Several years ago, I ran the verbatim-search experiment with a channel called "FreedomToons"--specifically, its video titled _"Free" Birth Control_. I got pages and pages of less-popular results related to birth control. That video may have been suppressed due to political reasons, but it demonstrates that UA-cam has long had its thumb on the scale when deciding which videos to show first.
So hilarious story. I opened this but didn't play it, saw the title of the video you were searching for and decided to watch it. Went to watch it, had the EXACT problem you're talking about, ended up searching for it directly on your channel to find it. Then after watching it came here and you talked about the exact problem I just had.
I didn't think I'd get the exact same problem until I tried, what the hell. I still couldn't even find the video after scrolling for ages but if I type it on google it shows up as the first result......
Legitimately I've had to stop using the youtube search entirely because not only will it give me things that are unrelated to my search, it's also prone to giving disturbing results randomly even while logged out in a private/incognito window. The worst thing I've ever personally seen in the results was when I was looking for instant pot recipes a few months back and got recommended one of those super intense pimple popper blackhead videos, which I have literally never watched and have actively avoided cause I think they're nasty.
i tried to find an upload of a police officer getting harassed by turkeys and i got an uncensored dashcam video of a woman being run over by a tractor-trailer. how does this even happen
Yep. I tried searching for a music video once and the fourth result was a gore video with a heartbreaking thumbnail. Needless to say, I got traumatized and never tried searching anything again.
Google can practically read my mind with its suggestions. Yet youtube can't get stuff as simple as I don't want to watch "how to fix a squeaky door" again every day for the rest of my life.
It's some kind of bizarre comedy that UA-cam shows you a re-upload of your own content with 140 views before getting close to showing you the original video.
It’s even worse for smaller creators. If you try to search a UA-cam name, they don’t pop up half the time until you start digging. Then you attempt to type in a video title of theirs with their name and they’re still the 7th option in the results page
I've had some of my videos show up as links to embeds(of the actual video) on forum sites or the like BEFORE the actual video itself shows up in the list.
They hide features which they don't want to continue supporting for whatever reason. That way they can get rid of the feature after a few years and claim it's because no-one was using it.
I am someone who knows about how to use the search filters to help find things but I still have problems because YT refuses to show me videos related to what I am searching for after the first few results even with filters on. It's impossible. They are breaking search on purpose because of some black box algorithm that tells them it will make them more money somehow. They probably have no comprehensive idea how it works. Theoretically, the algorithm could be misreporting its own effectiveness to YT and nobody would know the difference. They took away usefulness and will try to sell it back to us with AI features. Also don't forget the environment cost of AI search is way worse than the old search we used to have. Business Insider: "Every 20 to 50 questions, ChatGPT servers need to "drink" the equivalent of a 16.9 oz water bottle. (...) While training GPT-3 in its data centers, Microsoft was estimated to have used 700,000 liters - or about 185,000 gallons - of fresh water. That's enough water to fill a nuclear reactor's cooling tower, per Gizmodo, and the same amount that is used to produce 370 BMW cars or 320 Tesla vehicles, per the study.”
This video came up in my recommended, so I watched it and was reminded of the gameplay mechanics video, so I wanted to watch it. I searched the name of that video and THIS VIDEO was the second result after the animated one
I actually found the video "games that think more gameplay mechanics equals more fun" as the FIRST result when I searched that phrase through Google's search rather than UA-cams own search-bar. That is absurd.
That makes perfect sense. Google did its job and got you to UA-cam. UA-cam is doing its job and using AI to keep people on the site as long as possible, regardless of how it changes the functionality.
@@mmseng2 why would I stay on UA-cam if I want to watch a particular video and it's easier to leave UA-cam to find it? I'm being incentivized to leave the website to find what I want. When that happens a user is far less likely to go back.
True, as a self described "Internet Historian" and love looking back on the old Y2K era of UA-cam in the 2000s, looking for old videos from the time is a nightmare and I consider it a miracle from God if a nonpopular video from the 2000s era is found. I at times have to type in the years like for example "2007 ghost videos" for example to get a decent search result.
I'm trying to find a specific video that just doesn't turn up anymore, not even if I filter by "watched." Before today, I figured it might have simply been deleted or privated, but now I'm honestly willing to bet it's still there and YT outright refuses to pull it up when I search for it. There has definitely been a steady decline in the quality of the YT search engine and algorithm for at least a year, now.
I had to write the channel name exclusively because an old solid vocaloid translyics still had most their videoes up, it gave me a scare when the titles did nothing. It's insane how useless youtube's search function has become.
Finally someone's talking about this!! It's damn near impossible to find videos since UA-cam always shoves completed unrelated videos from my normal reccomended section! It seriously sucks, especially when you're trying to find videos about obscure games or media and the results just won't stop showing unrelated garbage!!
Others have tried but are being censored. That’s something else that needs a video: the censorship. Not sure what AI they’re using to filter comments, but it sucks.
@@Smethells2023What I hate is UA-cam never notifies you in any way of what they do. No "we removed this comment of yours" or "this youtuber deleted your comment" email. The comment doesn't even disappear, the only way you can tell the comment is gone is by editing it and trying to repost it. If it shows a generic error message then it's been deleted.
I tried searching "games that think more gameplay mechanics equals more fun" on google, and it did actually show his video as the first result. Pretty stupid that such a solution is necessary, but if you're after a specific video that might be one way to find it.
youtube really needs a rival. they can do whatever they want only because they own the entire market. if there's a competitor i bet they'll think twice before making any stupid and annoying decision like these past few years...
no one can realistically afford to be a competitor. people want the freedom to upload 2+ hour long videos on youtube. who else can afford to let users do that for FREE besides google? the sheer amount of server space required to do this is crazy.
@@Mishakeet exactly. and then to even keep afloat, you need moderation and, unfortunately, some form of monetization else a competitor can't even pay server bills. If going down the advertiser route, now you have to worry if advertisers think your platform is worth spending money on, because initially, no one is on your platform. Same deal with content creators who are subject to the network effect.
I love the fact that when u search for something now and scroll down far enough you’ll just get your WATCH HISTORY, and whatever videos you haven’t finished, like jesus christ the search engine can’t even give me results based on my search by title, it just gives me what I ALREADY am watching.
Actually switched over to Bing this week. Crazy actually being able to search things and get an answer without having to add "reddit" to the end of my question
Mannn I wish that were the case for me. I switched to bing last month because google search is utter garbage... but bing isn't much better. Even when I add quotations or alter the phrasing, a lot of times it's still hard to find what I'm actually searching for.
100% Microsoft needs to make a good video hosting platform and take over. I'm getting to fed up with Google after being loyal to them for so long. I used all their products and now I'm slowly phasing each one out. (Chromebook, Chromecast, Pixel, Chrome, UA-cam)
I wish I could say that Bing is any better. Looking past the atrocious UI/UX. Firefox is the closest to being helpful and Brave tries to sell the illusion of privacy and safety (same with Opera but badly)
I think the new search system might also be the reason I keep getting shown disgusting gore/body horror thumbnails when I’m searching for completely unrelated and innocuous terms. I’ve gotten multiple of those stupid skin trypophobia images, images of fake-looking, overly grotesque skin conditions, and just the other day I saw what was quite literally just the severed head of a seagull. I’m very sensitive to body horror and gore, and I also have intrusive thoughts that get worse when I see that kind of stuff, so it really does screw with me. I’ve started reporting those videos, I hope that stops soon.
Yes, extremely repulsive thumbnails for videos with spurious content, get recommended alongside any serious topic I search. That stuff needs its own content safety filter! The thumbnails alone qualify as traumatic viewing. I never watch that crap, yet UA-cam promotes it as suggested "For You", right next to the non-sensationalistic content I'm searching for.
Something that happened to me recently: I remember a song I search it Only the music video shows up I search the same but with "audio" The audio only version does show up but it's a re-upload I click on the re-upload and the audio uploaded by the Artists channel shows up on the right Amazing
Once upon a time, I would finish cooking, sit down, open youtube, and find an interesting video in less than a minute. Now I have to previously prepare a playlist with the videos, otherwise my food would get cold while scrolling to find something I actually care about watching.
I also have to say, it's not just youtube's fault by trying to show me what they think I like, it's also the videos itself.... it's so difficult to find a youtuber doing what they like in a sea of people trying to beat the algorithm and be as trendy/clickbaity as posible. Now that everyone knows that you could get rich by doing this, everyone is trying to grab your attention for views and money. I'm so tired, it's not a pleasant feeling looking for videos on youtube anymore, it's pain
this is so wholesome to watch, trust me. I have been desperate to find certain videos in the context of a research about events around a German UA-camr that went insane at some point. That got me started to look into what caused the decline of google's searching engine and the point with this iceberg is that it is so hard to find any hint on wether other people suffer this problem aswell either because no one talks about it or because those results are filtered/ low prioritized for some reason whatsoever (active banning?/Changes in the algorithm?/"Optimization" or customization of search requests?). Thank you for your contribution and affirmation tho.
I use UA-cam a fair bit for tutorial videos, but there's little to no way of finding what i need in the search bar. So i search on duckduck go then go to videos and what i need comes up. More of it at least.
The home page isnt any better, suddenly out of nowhere within the last few weeks ive just been bombarded with videos ive never shown an interest in, many of which are only a minute or two, i once had to hit the not interested button on like 6 posts in a row
yesss. and if you refresh it, it will be the same videos again. if i didn't watch it the first 40 times you recommended it, i won't watch it now! i have to turn on post notificantions for the people i subscribe to as well. i could watch every video they've uploaded for the past 5 years and youtube still won't recommend their new videos. oh yeah, and youtube shorts, AKA the same 5 creators on a loop along with random videos that have 0 likes for a good reason.
I've been recommended the air safety videos of Air India several times this week it's so annoying. I don't live in India and haven't watched any India or flight related videos recently, so I have no idea why it keeps doing that
I've brought this up to people before. The search function didn't use to serve recommended videos, but now that it does, it seems the only reliable search for lost videos in my watch history...
It's the same with Web Search. In the old days the results would point to pages that actually contained the words that you searched for. Now the way it works is: "You type some words, press Enter, and our AI wills serve you some recommendations based on those words you typed." (relevance not guaranteed; in fact there is guaranteed to be much irrelevant nonsense containing only _antonyms_ of your search terms)
nah searching your history ain't any better i've tried that a few times and you either have to be super specific or input the exact title of the vid and even then sometimes it won't show you the vid you're looking for just vids with similar titles that you only watched 2 secs of before clicking off
Exactly. It’s good to know I’m not the only one. Lots of comments on here expressing concerns about the same thing - UA-cam shoving creepy, disturbing, brain rot type material in front of us.
Here after your recent video, and I admire the depth of your sciencing in this one! You did find it! After, I'm sure, pulling out every hair on your head individually.
I once typed in a guys name and got no results. Typed in his first name only, still no results. Typed in his company and found the email thread with his email address that had his full name in. What is wrong with the search engine!
So much stuff is being Memory Holed because of this. The biggest issue is that it mixes in recommendations with the search results, and just gives up after 5 incorrect videos. "Ahh... I can't be bothered looking for more. Why don't you just take this unrelated Asmongold video instead?"
@@matthewcharles9813I love Asmon. It's recommending him because I watch everything he posts, but I was looking for something specific... You can literally write the title correct word by word, and it still refuses to do it. It's a huge problem, honestly.
I hate that half the time I just have to open a new tab and Google the video I’m looking for. And it actually comes up. But not when I type it into the search bar of the website it comes from. Magnificent. Thank you, UA-cam.
Are you kidding? I mean, you're right, but you're also a scam channel. People just thumbed you up because checkmark and they're dumb. With bought subs and an AI voice, too. You're part of the problem. Pathetic.
But they'll make ads the most intrusive things ever by first hiding the yellow markers for them, then making 15 second unskippable ads, and making it so that they shove a banner down your throat over the comments and video description and you have to go out of your way to get rid of it
"Improving". Implying it's not intentional. UA-cam search DID work, until 1-2 years ago at least. Been on YT since 2006, and while it has improved, it feels like they're morally obligated every few years to design something *_everyone_* hates. It's not even like they're shadowbanning adult content; it happens to safe videos too. This is a weird af experiment.
@@BreakdancePeach I feel like companies would rather reduce the quality in order to keep random people employed because if they reached a good satisfaction level, what else would they need to fix?
The frustrating thing is that it was really good at some point. I remember regularly using youtube search for my questions (like "how to do x"), now it is completely useless. Nowadays, I google my question and look at the videos tab or find a youtube link in a forum or so. It is really sad.
Still pissed they got rid of the visible downvotes system just because some companies cried that they were losing out on profits when fans showed their dislike of a product. Now it hurts the non-corporate side of UA-cam because you can no longer tell if a video is giving wrong information. This is a pretty big deal with home repair videos
I’ll search the names of pretty popular creators a lot and have to scroll down for awhile to actually find the account, if at all. There’s so many times I’ve thought a channel was deleted cause I couldn’t find it in the search, it’s crazy
god i felt like i was going crazy. ive been watching youtube pretty much every day since 2015 or so, and i swear the search and recommended functions werent this bad till now. literally just like 5 minutes ago, i wanted to listen to something while i did my animal crossing dailies, and youtube kept showing me the same 10 videos over and over for some reason. ive been trying to use the subscriptions tab more and more but old habits die hard lol
yeah omg i cant believe its not just me ?? like ,, the youtube home page is just showing me the same videos over and over and over ?? why ??? no matter how much i refresh ?? its the same exact videos ??
@@quinnjohnson9750 It even does this with random, dog shit video creators who have no views or subscriber base and terrible videos. And stuff that totally does not interest me will stay in my feed FOREVER unless I click not interested or do not recommend channel. It's insane. The site truly is slowly dying.
Unfortunately I am pretty sure the subscriptions tab has also for years already had problems with not showing videos by some creators, even though you may be subscribed to them. I don't use the tab as often anymore, but I know for a fact that multiple creators have noticed these problems over the years and never have seen UA-cam adress this
I have noticed the exact same issue with one of my videos. It is my most popular video with 25 million views, but it does not show up when searching, even when adding my username to it. I’m glad it’s not just me, but baffled and frustrated that it’s seemingly a wider problem Extremely strange
i just searched the video you're referring to and was expecting to be like "idk this seems like bait to get me to search for this person's video" and i expected to be able to come back here and be like "you're a liar" but... nope, you're right. if i type your username and the title of the fucking video you are referring to, it does not show up. if i google the same exact term it's the TOP RESULT. what the hell, why
Hot damn, you're right. UA-cam even autofills with its name, but when you actually search it, you get latest from your channel (which is obviously incorrect), then the wrong vid, the wrong vid, the wrong vid, something from your MUSIC channel, some OTHER video with 2300 views that has the title and your name but isn't it, then the People Also Watched section which is hell, then the wrong video, the wrong video, the wrong video, the wrong video, the wrong video, the For You section which is just the front page but smaller, then a REACTION to the wrong video, then the wrong video, then the Previously Watched section which is completely worthless, then the wrong video, then SOMEONE ELSE'S animation, then the wrong video, then a cut clip with 20 views, then a SPANISH DUB OF THE CORRECT VIDEO. It takes scrolling all the way down to your BEST OF playlist to finally find something that actually has THE VIDEO THAT WAS SEARCHED FOR.
This is so true!! the search function has been broken for a good while and it is sad!! Also there's the weird horrible things that appear in the " People also watched" section when you search a video... I have been searching sewing tutorials to start to learn the craft as a hobby and the "people also watched" section was riddled with disgusting thumbnails of faces with gigantic black heads, a child screaming with someone with tweezers in their ears and a title like "you wonldn't believe what was in her ear", another thumbnail of goat and a man with a machete over the animal's head, and overall GROSS stuff, I have NEVER EVER have searched or watched a video like that before, I didn't watched the videos when the were presented in the "people also watched" and I will never EVER watch them even if other people have watched them so WHY is the algorithm putting those there???? But more important: How the F are those videos related to learning how to sew?!?!?! And now I haven't been searching videos about sewing because I don't want to see those disgusting thumbnails ever again! Another thing: I am partially deaf so I rely on the subtitles to watch content in UA-cam and any other plataform, when I am watching the videos in my TV (samsung with Tizen, or dumb tv with chromecast) each time UA-cam puts an ad in a video the subtitles get deactivated and you have to activate them again each time an ad was placed (and with the increased number of ads being served is a PITA), but even worse sometimes it won't even give you the optioin to reactivate them unless you close the app and restart it.
I've experienced those weird gross unrelated video recs as well! The same ones you described! Unnerving and puzzling. And for some reason, when you see them in search results you can't click "not interested". Wouldn't it make sense to be able to "tune" the search by culling unwanted results?
@@geckovonparsley8200 that's the most horrible thing! you can't hide them, you can't use the "not interested" or the " Don't recommend channel" it is really horrible!!
@@anyvander7824 so in general it is a plague of the arts and crafts section of UA-cam, which is disturbing because what would happen if a child searchs for origami, sewing, etc.? are they going to be exposed to those horrible things??
UA-cam logic Literal abuse and gore of baby animals: Ah yes, perfectly acceptable! Let’s put this in everyone’s recommended! Robots making spam videos and stealing other videos: Amazing! Let’s give them thousands of dollars! A random meme video with no offensive content at all: UNACCEPTABLE!! HOW EVIL
copy pasting this advice everywhere in the comments: Try adding before:[current year + 1] at the end of the search to eliminate the "for you" and "people also watched" garbage. For example: since the year that this comment is written is 2024, type in before:2025
Google's reverse image search is garbage now too. You have to go through multiple clicks and their advertiser nonsense to even get it to work like it should.
Using the old reverse image search, recently I’ve had tons of scam(?) sites pop up that just rehost images from other sites (and sells them? never clicked on them), never the original sites themselves which has been horrible, and I can’t figure out what to search to see if other people have the same issue and if there’s a way to fix it (probably not)
yeah, I don't know if you can even call that pile of dung a search function. It gives you a few somewhat related results and immediately goes: "but now, look at this totally unrelated crap, it's great"
Yt search is now the bane of my existence!! Even worse when looking for very specific/obscure terms, and the algorithm breaks and shows me random videos that are either gross or wildly unrelated. I get morbidly skinny eugenia cooney videos recommended for CROCHET TUTORIALS, and I get disgusting pimple/injury/open wound videos for ASMR searches. I hate it here
THOSE ARE THE ONES, I mentioned in another comment thread being pushed those exact same Eugenia Cooney videos but for me they appear in relation to sewing, not crocheting. For some reason the algorithm associates crafts with anorexia. I don't know if there is a high overlap between people with those hobbies and people suffering with eating disorders or what but if I'm even close that means YT is actively pushing content that can harm people directly to the people most likely to be triggered by it and self harm as a result. I was hoping it was just a weird quirk of my algorithm but seeing others mention seeing the same thing is so worrying. That in conjunction with the fact that youtube consistently refuses to honor user requests to not be recommend certain content makes this so dangerous.
Omg! I was looking at painting/drawing videos and she was getting recommended to me. So the entire art community is suffering from this huh?. From what I remember yt doesn't really like art(using art as an umbrella term here) videos. So my best guess is that it's trying to recommended us videos that might make us click on it. Just speculation
WOAH EXACTLY. wth is with these weird Eugenia Cooney uploads? I'll search like "hair colour tutorial" or "____ gameplay" and it recommends me videos from these super weird channels??? Like it's FILLED with them?
What's funny is that those search queries work perfectly in Google search, and give the correct video as top result. I almost never use UA-cam search but didn't realize just how bad it is until now
Man, if only Google would just buy UA-cam and fix its search function! You know, instead of buying UA-cam and completely dismembering its search function.
Let’s also talk about the suggested next to a video you’re watching. I’ll be rewatching a video from a series, look in the suggested for the next one, but it’s just a wall of unrelated stuff that I’ve already seen, stuff that I looked up the day before, and a few videos peppered in with 16 views about something I would never look up. I have to scroll so far down just to find another video from the same channel that I’m currently watching.
I can't have autoplay on because 9 times out of 10 it's some random twitch vod with double digit views. It's NEVER anything related, in order to see similar things I have to leave full screen and CHOOSE AN OPTION TO GIVE RELATED VIDEOS. That or just more from the same channel, because usually their "related" content is still dogshit. But I don't understand what the recommended videos are supposed to be if not related to what I'm currently watching
I've been getting a rash of Indonesian tech tutorial videos with less than 100 views Sure I watch tech content but YT has no reason to think I know anything but English.
My favorite is when I'm watching a Let's Play series, and the next video plays, and it's not the next video in the series. Instead it's a different video in the series. Why? All of the videos are literally labeled: Game - # (title), it feels like it should pick up the fact that I'd want to watch episode 3 after episode 2, especially if I've saved the whole dang playlist to my library!
Thanks for talking about this with a big platform, I have been posting about this and even sending feedback to UA-cam to no avail for a while now. I literally can't find anything, and what new videos I do get recommended on the home screen seem tailor made to be annoying, irrelevant or controversial. The website is broken. I basically have to Google (ironic) any UA-cam video I want to see nowadays.
here's my Patreon: www.patreon.com/prozd
I agree it is absolute dogshit 😂
The thing is, UA-cam isn't going anywhere because it still doesn't have any good competitors to scare them into making a better product, and I don't know if they ever will
ha already did
I sadly can’t go to Patreon, because I am not rich. 😢
I mean its $1 so err @@Son_Joe_Productions
Don’t even fucking get me started on the “you might also like” section. I want my search to be a fucking search
“Here’s a bunch of fun unrelated shorts!”
“Please don’t show me shorts.”
“Understandable, *we’ll be back in a month’s time.”*
“You mean two weeks.”
This frustrates me to no end, I used to look up obscure video game music to use in my d&d games and now its always the same 10 results, followed by "You migh also like" videos that arent even music, its atrocious
There's a workaround for it: type "before:2025" (without quotes, and with a space after) at the start of your search. Limiting your search to results uploaded before a certain year gives a proper list of search results rather than four results and then "you might also like" -- and, by specifying a year in the _future_ recent videos will show up.
It's beyond absurd that this is necessary, though.
@@Alfwin wait it works that’s awesome
@@Mecceldorf one time i hid shorts, then it said it'd hide for a month and they were back in the same day
The instant UA-cam added the "People also watched" section to search results is when I knew this website was capitalizing on addiction marketing to the point of being useless.
I don't want my search to bombard me with random nonsense, I want to find what I'm looking for.
UA-cam knows what you like and you’ll like it!
Agreed. Apart from its functionality being abysmal to begin with, It's annoying that the initial search results are cluttered with unrelated recommendations instead of focusing on what you're actually searching for, defeating the main purpose of a search function...
God is dead and the For You section killed him
It's a budding Tik Tok
I was looking into the nba one time and I got a huge spoiler for god of war ragnarok because of the "people also watch" feature like what? that's two worlds different
He didn't even get into how if you scroll down a little more the search results become completely unrelated to what you looked up
"you might also be interested in" *stuff that gets put in your recommended*
NO I AM NOT, ITS WHY IM SEARCHING FOR THIS THING YOU'RE NOT SHOWING ME
Mine just becomes pornography
Bruh, that’s always been a thing
Yes! It’s creeped me out multiple times and just had me nope tf out of scrolling through video inspos, because suddenly I was in a completely different area of YT.
How has anybody who works at UA-cam ever thought that was a good feature? It throws me into fits of rage when I am searching for something and I have to scroll past a bunch of random crap that explicitly isn't what I am looking for. Everybody seems to understand that it's annoying. I've never seen anybody claim they like this behavior. Somebody important at UA-cam is just like, "No, we've chosen to be worse. And no matter how often we make changes to things, we will never change this one thing everybody hates."
Me: Search for anything in the YT search bar.
UA-cam: Here's 8 videos that aren't what you wanted. End of Search.
I hate that the search function will also just give you a "watch these unrelated videos AGAIN" section. Awful.
Not just that, I fucking hate when the search results include unrelated popular NSFW videos. Especially a couple years ago, *before I was 18.* Do better, UA-cam. This is disgusting.
@@CrustyFox87THIS
It makes UA-cam look like a pron site
It's so annoying
I've had searches where I literally had more "watch these again" and "people also watched" results than *actual* results.
"Hey, we can't figure out what you're looking for. So watch this again. You liked this, right? You watched it all the way to the end."
I too am getting very annoyed with the increase in "Watch Again" videos in my feed/sidebar. Yes it's one thing to watch JUST my subscription, but sometimes I do want to watch something new or from outside my subs. And seeing a host of videos I either JUST watched, "partially watched but decided it wasn't my thing, but youtube things I didn't finish it and I should", or "videos I watched ages ago and should probably rewatch" annoys the living hell out of me........ This place is going to hell.
Even worse is that, the further down you go, UA-cam will actually start LOOPING search results that you just looked at near the top, so instead of coming to more obscure videos related to your topic, you just get the exact same results all over again, plus random recommendations from unrelated videos you watched like four days ago!
YESS THIS IS SO TRUE and i feel like its the biggest glitch, like fr do better you make billions a year
I thought it was just my browser screwing up
It's frustratingly infantilizing. They don't trust their users to know what we want.
This is so frustrating when I am trying to find a video! It just keeps looping! Sometimes it feels like I can go by the same unrelated video five times before I actually find what I’m looking for. It also feels like the further you go the less new stuff you see and more of is just the some unrelated stuff that you’ve already seen!
4 days... try videos you watched 4 years ago,, and basing suggestions on that... and suggesting something that you have spent a year telling google explicitly that I Do NOT LIKE...
Yet next search... FISHING... (Or base ball, or music... what ever it was that month I spent days saying to every suggestion I DON'T LIKE...
I spend more time telling UA-cam to FO than I do watching videos (or adds)... so neither of us win... and I have a new addiction.
This video is now higher in the search results for "games that think more gameplay mechanics equals more fun" than the original video is.
Checked and confirmed. Truly beautiful.
Recency is all that matters to the search function. So dumb.
the irony
I knew it was popular but seeing that it has 15M views... why would reuploads or completely different/unrelated videos with like a couple hundred views EVER be considered more "relevant" than a 15M view video with the exact phrase you're searching as its title???
it's hidden for some reason. This isn't related to watch history either
I remember when Google's search algorithm was so good it gave me the names of songs I only had a vague idea of what the lyrics were, and I didn't even have to use double quotes. That's because it used to give you the results that were closest to your exact wording instead of "giving up" at the second result, not to mention it used to allow you to see EVERY result it could find on the web, which sometimes was extremely useful. Many people have mentioned before how a result on, say, page 15 was exactly what they were looking for. This was back in 2009 or so.
Now, changing the algorithm a little so it tries to fix your typos, or include closely related words that might be related to your search if the results would be few otherwise, that makes sense. But now it's all about how they can distract you so you can see more ads; the results you get often have """related""" terms that have absolutely NOTHING to do with the words you used.
related to how they automatically assume you made a typo is how it just seems to completely ignore a large swathe of symbols in your search? like i’ll search up “% symbol” or something similar and it’ll give me results like i just searched “symbol”, absolutely mental. great job guys
@@bigfongz WHY IS THIS SO ACCURATE
I tried to search " :troll: " and it changed it to "troll" (which also caused it to show Trolls (the movie) related stuff)
You know what happened. Money and greed happened. We all took their free search for granted and now they just sell you answers no matter what you asked. Try to google a computer problem and low and behold the complete first page will be scam sites who just bought their way to front of the line. It's not about solving it's about getting your money. I use yandex and bing more often. Also Kagi but it's paid, but it is what google use to be so maybe worth it.
i looked up a type of perspective but it gave me shitty pictures of side profiles that were nowhere near to what i searched, i NEED good results for ART
I cannot search anything, especially related to a service like healthcare or home improvement, without having to use advanced search to exlcude all the unrelated buzzwords google thinks I want to see. It's driving me crazy when I just need a simple answer to a question and I cannot find it anymore
I also hate the unrelated "related to your search" videos and shorts interrupting your search
> "ppl also watch"
i don't fucking care 😂 show me what i searched 😅
There is an extension that fixes this problem. It's called "Search Fixer For UA-cam"
i hate shorts so much man. literally downloaded a 3rd party youtube client to block them on the entire app, only stopped using it cus the app stopped getting updates and wouldnt connect to youtubes servers anymore
@@mbazea4423and it’s the worst clickbait videos you’ve ever seen
The worst part is that it's usually something gross or disturbing. I once searched up a video of Vault 88 (From Fallout 4) to look up settlement building tutorials, and I kid you not, first search result was a sex toy. I don't even watch pron so I don't know why it's targeting me with this gross stuff. At least it's not as bad as when I typed "Cute dog videos" and UA-cam showed a thumbnail of a bleeding dog.
Things I hate about the youtube search:
1. Exactly what you mentioned.
2. The sheer amount of non-related content being stuffed in my face every time I look something up.
3. Said non-related content LIMITING THE ACTUAL SEARCH TO JUST A FEW RELEVANT RESULTS
Dude whenever I search for literally anything I get more videos unrelated to my search that are simply just recommended to me than videos related to my actual search. It's so annoying, especially because UA-cam's recommended feature is also broken and it doesn't know what I want.
Additionally frustrating because those unrelated (and often weirdly upsetting?) video suggestions don't have ANY option to select "I'm not interested" or "stop showing me this" at all.
I hate when I'm looking up literally anything and it's like "Heyyyy man, you want some p**n?" And I'm like "no??? I wanted some game theory 'WOW could've prevented covid' you know, the thing i typed"
@@knighter1209I thought the recommendations were shite too, until a started getting videos like “screaming sausages” and “Chinese Bluetooth lady”. Now I think UA-cam knows me too well 🥲
It actually makes me sad to see the state UA-cam is in right now. I grew up with UA-cam as far back as 2009 and I cannot recall a time it was EVER this atrocious. ):
It's such a pain to use anymore. The search function is worse, every corner of the platform is overloaded, it's not user-friendly, and they let LITERALLY ANYONE show ads so there is literal p*rn being shown to people via ads. Worse still is that plenty of kids use regular UA-cam, and p*rn addiction is extremely easy to obtain at a young age, that's why professionals strongly urge parents to monitor their children's used websites and stuff. Now kids are getting easy access to p*rn because of these ads showing up, advertising their websites and crap... it's awful.
I just wish we had the ads from 2013 again. Those PooPouri ads were hilarious, I remember back in that day everyone would be talking about it! UA-cam ads used to be treated as actual commercials, but they still wanted to grab your interest to keep you entertained since you'd be forced to watch the ad. Now it's just clickbait bullshit and corporate nothingness (and p*rn). So a lot of users utilize ad blocking extensions to keep themselves sane... which UA-cam hates, and that's why they're ruining their platform. There is literal proof that UA-cam is slowing down their website for people who are using ad blockers, regardless of whether or not they have Premium; and even more recently, they are purposefully sabotaging the search results for ad blocker users. Again, there is proof of this happening (I've watched people turn their ad blocker on, refresh, bad results / turn ad blocker off, refresh, good results).
Nothing hurts more than watching UA-cam become a successful platform where future stars would get their start, to a platform that cares more about their p*rn ad money than their consumers. Their rise and fall was so drastic, it would look like a mountain when graphed...
Amazing. Google, the company that everyone started using because they had the best search engine in the business, has slowly obliterated the usefulness of the search function in every product they own.
Google has become the very thing it swore to destroy... Yahoo
(joke shamelessly stolen from Savannah)
Google’s motto should basically be, “Where ELSE are you gonna go?”
@@jpryan90 wait McDonalds was different back then?
Enshittification galore
Because they have a monopoly over searches and don't need to be reliable anymore
This has gotten to the point where if I want to watch a video I've seen before, I just search my watch history. I don't waste my time with the """search""" function anymore.
The thing is that search function doesn't even work for me half the time either 😭
@@alphavasson5387 fr I search for a specific channel and some of the videos that I know I WATCHED just do not appear
There’s a simple trick to get the old search back, just put “before:2025” after your search, for example: skydiving before:2025
@@marcd7332 Or install a plugin.
I have something like four or five of those just to make youtube bearable. Fix the search, no short, no mainstream media, return the dislike button, etc.
They really should incorporate a search bar over the watch history and in some video lists. It really gets confusing sometimes, scrolling and scrolling isn't the best sometimes, the page don't charges and Ctrl+F could not get what you are searching for.
Even the tags should be consistent and functional.
If someone has a project over this thing, please let me know or just try to get someone to get coverage on that, thanks
The worst thing is how they shove completely unrelated videos in the search results. Really gross or triggering stuff like blackheads being removed or a clickbaity title about someone dying. They don't even give you the option to block those videos like you can in the homepage.
This!!! The only option is to report them, it’s ridiculous how UA-cam actively breaks things that didn’t require fixing in the first place.
For real! Hate being jumpscared when trying to look up harmless content
Click "videos" after you click search, at the top, filters out the random stuff and shorts.
same. complete garbage if you ask me.
Gaaaaaaah I wish there was a way to block channels from search results. I hate hate hate hate hate hate haaaaate it when I'm looking up a show or game and all that shows up is complaint videos from culture warriors.
This doesn't even get into the awful thing where you scroll for a bit, and then UA-cam decides to show you unrelated videos you might want to watch. It makes utterly no sense
and it will stop showing you new results and instead keep repeating the same results in a loop over and over. very reliable.
or show the exact same ones you already scrolled past.
its like youtube is being like "are you sure you dont want to watch this video?"
Or, worse, it decides "Hey wanna rewatch this video you watched yesterday?"
How about the gore-bait videos, with titles like "Don't Look Away Challenge" or just something about some disgusting medical issue with awful bodily effects. Yeah, I still get those even when I'm trying to find a piece of classical music (I didn't realize symphonies come with rotting nails and trypophobic diseases!) 🤮
Its all about not quite giving you what you want, so you stay on the platform longer and watch more vids and more ads as a result. The entire platform is designed to suck up your attention and time and turn you into an ad watching consumerist robot. Think about it for a bit and you'll start seeing it
Insulting how UA-cam considers a reupload more relevant to the search result than the original.
if i had to take a guess as to why its prioritizing those, its probably an oversight in trying to make smaller channels more visible. with broader topics like specific video games, that's fine, but in a case like this, the "smaller channels" are just reuploaders
@@yeahboiii6351That's a fair assumption
especially when the reupload has ~300 views, that's what I find most irritating
@@yeahboiii6351 That's quite the oversight. Small channels shouldn't be pushed by horrible search results. If they want to promote them they should be shown in the feed.
I find it funny that UA-cam cracked down on compilation channels and videos and then this is what’s happening now 😂
This hurts YT and Google in the long run. YT feels much smaller to me now than it did a decade ago because I engage less with the interfaces (search and the front page) that surface new content and creators, and instead just use my subscription page for the channels that I already know.
Don't forget the opposite problem many of us deal with: when I first uploaded my video essay, it was literally unsearchable. I could type in exactly the title and it would never at any point come up in a search. It had to get a thousand views before the algorithm acknowledged its existence, and tens of thousands before it could be searched in unrelated terms.
The truth, which I can see in my video recs, is that the algorithm doesn't really want people searching at all. It just wants to constantly have things to recommend to keep you addicted. If it could help you find the one specific thing you wanted, then you might be satisfied with youtube and stop watching it! Can't have that!
Gods, I hate how accurate that assessment is. But that's exactly why they've done shit like this to their platform.
To them, it's no bug, it's no new flaw that has to be addressed. It's a feature.
That's the real reason there. It's not in their interest to give you what you want. They only care about extracting the maximum amount of profit, so this behaviour is by design. It's not like we have a choice, there is no competing video platform anywhere near as popular.
And the future they are aiming for is UA-cam Shorts being the dominate format. I won't be surprised of they "got rid" of basic free YT and you were forced to use YT Shorts and if you wanted to see your favorite content creator, then YOU WILL HAVE TO buy YT Premium to watch them
Thank you for saying that - this makes me feel better about my feeling that no amount of curation makes youtube more useable - it's designed to be a time suck full stop
Kinda reminds me of how free live service games operate. The more time you spend playing the more money you might be spending - or in UA-cam's case, the more ads you might be watching.
"We've looked at what you searched for. He's some stuff other people who searched for vaguely similar things wound up watching." is the most useless way to implement a search function. And it's *so* much harder to implement than the dumb search engine that does what the user expects and wants.
They've done(probably still are) automatic demonetization like that before as well.
I have literally never clicked on anything in that section. Searching something is supposed to be about user choice. I feel like more and more I'm just being told what I "should" watch.
My feed occasionally gets filled with Indian celebrity news. The only reason I can think of for that happening is that I might have recently watched a tech video by an Indian guy, so now UA-cam thinks I'm interested in Bollywood crap. I have a long list of Indian gossip channels that I've blocked.
That's not what they're doing. It's "here's what we think will lead to you watching the maximum amount of ads." That's why there's so much rage bait, because lots of people will spend hours making themselves mad.
it used to be so damn simple. here is a list of hits, in descending order, from most relevant/most views to least views. yeah, it meant that smaller content got swept under the bus, but you know what? maybe the "explore" section of youtube should stay *separate* from the *SEARCH* function!
If you are looking for something specific, it's fucking impossible. UA-cam would rather you just turn on autoplay and turn your brain off.
to get rid of the "people also watched" or "you may also like" put in "Before:2025" and put quotes around words/sentences to look for a specific thing/phrase
UA-cam Search along with Google Search has gotten so bad lately. In the past they used to group the most relevant results at the top. For example if you search for Witcher 3 Guide, the results from GameFAQs, Fextralife, Fandom, Game Pressure, would all be grouped together at the top. Today they're sorted all over the place and there's tons of irrelevant results in between them. Game Pressure would be on the 10th page and tons of irrelevant results would be above it.
At this point I believe that they see the UA-cam audience as unintelligent zombies mindlessly consuming content
@@AniTube-ds8uz I mean....
EXACTLY my problem. I once tried searching “in defense of American city design” and I just got the same old Urbanism UA-camrs talking about how great bike lanes and public transit are and how awful American city design is, instead of, you know, even a single video presenting the counterargument.
I’m quite sure those videos exist. If only there were a way for me to search for them!
Another thing I haven't seen mentioned in the comments yet:
When I'm searching for videos of animals, I guarantee I do not want videos of animals being killed, tortured, or eaten alive, but those are always what youtube puts near the top.
You've clicked them once before thats the reason its testing you with them for vaguely unrelated stuff.
I just tested with somebody else, scrolled for 400ish videos with the search string that they say brought animal gore.
For me, "cute deer" gave mostly cute deer or other animal videos. In about 400 videos not one was gore like they said.
@supremebuffalo6322 no, I've never clicked on videos like that and I still get like dr pimple popper or animal abuse videos and I'm just so shocked???? It's actually revolting and makes me close out of youtube because I'm just trying to search something!
@@smokugokustrangely enough, when I report these videos it’s actually effective and I get an email saying it’s been taken down
when i searched up hamster videos and it showed me a bullfrog live feeding :(
Same.
Made a search for a video of a cat farting.
Got recommended a content farm full of animals either dying of mortal injuries, or dying from indescribably horrific birth defects (all of which are shown in the thumbnails they recommended).
Pretty muck every video had the same generic 2005 adult-alternative sounding song with the same 2 second clip of a young asian woman with a crying filter attached.
Absolutely true of Google as well. you can literally set it to verbatim mode, put your search in quotes, and still not get what you're trying to search for because it picked one word in the search to focus on.
They also removed all the useful operators. Used to be able to just put -websitefullofspamresults and it would stop showing you that website in your results. Only search engine I've found that retains that functionality is DuckDuckGo which has its own weaknesses
I highly recommend Bing. Tried it once, never went back
First full page of results is sponsored "results" that are AT BEST tangentially related to what you're looking for, too.
Works better than youtube. Just slip past the annoying stuff up top if its obvious.
I love when I search '"median" income in [blank]' or something like that with median in quotes, and the search is like, "Here are some averages". That is not what median is! Median and mean are different things! That's why I put the quotes there!
UA-cam is completely broken now. Loads of my recommended is now full of content UA-cam has decided I should want to watch that are nothing like anything I'm interested in or have ever watched before. It doesn't matter how much I say "not interested", it just keeps coming. It even keeps recommending channels after I say "don't recommend channel".
I don't think I've ever voluntarily watched a reaction video & I've definitely never Liked one, yet they're suggested above the original videos.
Then there's the "For You" which are somehow 50% for me & 50% the diametric opposite of anything I'd want to watch. "Not Interested" downranks whole categories rather than specific topics, yet the absolute worst topics just get suggested anyway
@@prophetzarquon1922 every time I see any reaction video I instantly click 'not interested'. UA-cam loves recommending those... Out of principle I will never watch one and block channels that mainly do reaction content...
oh god, i hate this. There is so much weak content on yt, and channels full of spoilers in the title, but for some reason YT just pushes it onto me a few weeks after i "do not recommend the channel", like "oh I'm sure you are no longer angy at that vid, let's forget your past grudge toward it, and maybe watch it INSTEAD OF LITERALLY MILLIONS OF OTHER VIDS"
Same here 💀
Huh. As someone who actually likes my home page and, as i just looked right now, all of the videos recommended are actually pretty accurate and stuff id watch, i wonder what i did differently, or maybe what you guys did differently. I genuinely have no complaints about my home page, i do agree with complaints on the search results tho
UA-cam search went from being able to give you results for songs just based on how it sounds in your head (plin plin plon, the Dark Souls Lord of Cinder song is the most popular example and one of the few that still works) to giving results completely and absolutely unrelated to anything you searched for whilst simultaneously feeding you with brain rot shorts and click-bait horny thumbnails on the side.
Right?! That’s my problem. I’ve been trying to find a song for days based off of the lyrics because it was in an advertisement, and I didn’t know the title, and it never shows me anything related to it. All it does is pulls up other songs that don’t even have the same lyrics in it. I’ve spent over an hour trying to find it.
@@eyeruscat9439 what're the lyrics? now i'm curious
@@arsonistnpc I finally found it after days of searching, but the lyrics I was typing in were, you’ve been acting so mysterious. You never thought I’d go, but do you now? You never took me seriously.
It was driving me crazy that I couldn’t find it.
one time i was looking for immigrant song by led zeppelin and couldn’t remember the name so i typed in “song that goes aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa”
Ugh, those gross thumbnails are the worst. I was looking for War of the Worlds music. Why are they showing a woman's private parts? How are they even allowed on UA-cam?
I'm scared of scrolling down the search page because weird videos that are totally unrelated to what I'm searching keep appearing. Like nasty stuff, and no, it has nothing to do with my search history, I've seen so many people complain about these creepy videos
After you search, press the filter button at the top right and press "type:video" and it will remove all the extra recommendations. It won't remove ads though.
Exactly. I hate it.
The worst thing is: the "You might also like" section followed by a "People also watched" section that are full of animated vore porn and nasty skin conditions and all kinds of mega cursed content that have nothing to do with your original normie search of kittens and music videos. And you can't turn this off either!
YES!! i've seen some of the most grotesque and horrifying thumbnails. and you cant even tell youtube to not recommend the channel!!! those videos they list don't have the option 😢
look for cyberpunk 2077 lets plays filter by playlist. youll get to actual porn in about 10 seconds of scrolling
I saw a baby with a deformity being fucking hit
Nasty skin conditions does sound cool though. In a bile fascination sort of way.
Dawg if that’s in the “you might also like” section then that’s your own fault
Edit: it’s also based on your browser history because if you use safari or google then google has your data. My recommendations are fine, y’all are the creeps.
What!? I didn’t realize it was this bad! It’s also annoying that when you search something, it shows about 7 related videos to your search, and then throws a bunch of random videos in “for you” and “people also watched” categories 🤦🏻♂️
exactly
what's weird is uh, yeah this is just proZD and complaining UA-cam is removing him from relevancy bc..
🤔
well it isn't bc they wanna promote him it seems.
🤷🏻♀️
can't argue with UA-cam literally showing him they don't want ppl to find his content
It doesn't always show up for some gods-forsaken reason, but I've found a way around that. If you get the option at the top to search for videos, playlists, etc., select "Videos" and it should only show results related to the search.
@@TemmiePlays it's not an issue specific to him, it's the fact that whe you search anything you get a bunch of unrelated crap and can't find content that you're actually looking for.
I don't know how much it improves search accuracy, but depending on browser there are some extensions that remove the For You videos and other junk results. A while ago I got annoyed enough to install one, so maybe you might want to look into that too. It really helps!
When you're the only hotel in town, you don't need to clean the sheets or fix the TV, or put in any effort whatsoever.
I’d find another hotel in another town if I could, but there aren’t any other towns.
maybe people could use DailyMotion insteaHAHAHAHA I'm sorry I couldn't finish that
The closest we ever got was Dailymotion.
On the contrary. I think they are making these changes to complete with tiktok (they want to be more algorithmic driven) and failing to recognize that many of their viewers are coming here bc we are not interested in toktok and want something different out of the platform.
@@Klaxyndthere are other towns, but they're in the middle of nowhere with double-digit population.
So glad someone else has mentioned this. Among the huge amount of criticism people have for UA-cam I have never seen this talked about before. Also when I search for a video on UA-cam it only gives me like 4 search results and the rest is more “recommended for you!” and “people who watched x also watched these:”. So annoying
Two things I really hate about searching on YT are:
1) Forcing completely irrelevant rage-bait videos, usually from News channels
2) Specific keyword search leads to actual NSFW material
They really should fix this but of course they won't.
yeah what keywords
provide keyword proof
Everyone asking for keywords 💀 theres dedicated websites for that shit just go there bruh why do you want to stroke it on UA-cam of all places
Oh, so I'm not the only one who gets reccomended those ragebait channels screaming about how "woke" everything is? I feel I've been getting recommended a few of them a week for months now it feels like. I don't watch anything like that on UA-cam.
Yeah, happens to me a lot. Tired of this nsfw stuff
If I recall correctly this happens because the algorithm they use has determined that your video had reached peak viewership and is instead recommending videos it determined has more potential to get clicks
🤢 ew that's yucky.
That is horrible and it makes looking for original content so much harder
A 10 year old video with 20M views barely benefits from a single view, but the exact same video reposted 15 minutes ago has unlimited potential!
😱😱😱
That is so believable and so horrifying
That makes absolutely no fucking sense since the entire point of searching for a video IS TO CLICK IT.
The worst is when you search for something and then there are *maybe* three videos that fit the search criteria, followed by 'you might like' and 'watch again' then maybe another couple of relevant videos before another 'people also watched' and then 'people also search for'... JUST GIVE ME VIDEOS FOR WHAT I'VE SEARCHED FOR! If I want a recommended video I'll use either the home page or the side bar of another video (which btw used to be related videos but are now just the same videos you get on the home page)
UA-cam has become that greedy salesman that won't stop trying to sell you everything except what you walked in for.
omg I thought the side bar was simply just me. I gaslit myself into thinking YT would never make such a silly and awful change. I despise it. sometimes I’ll be watching a series and the next episode won’t show up on the side and I have to search for it. whyyyy? yet yk what I do get? a completely UNRELATED video (unrelated in the sense I’ve NEVER shown interest to anything close to the topic) from a channel with 2 subscribers and the video will have 356 views. it’s cool I’m being shown low-count videos but they’re not made for me.
I used to use UA-cam heavily for music discovery. The classical music I listen to used to not have ads ( or just 1 in the beginning) and other songs by the composer or in the genre would show up in the side. It's useless now. You will get 12 ads in the middle of a porce with 1k views and random popular videos will be in the side. Who wants that? Why not have different places for different things?
I so feel that about the side bar, I used to find pretty much all the music I liked through UA-cam, but today that wouldn't be possible. So iirc they wanted to tweak the algorithm so that it wouldn't lead people down political extremist rabbit holes anymore... but who'd have thought that the way to do that is by just making the algorithm completely useless.
So annoying.
Idk if its gotten deleted or if i need to find on their channel where they upload every other day a video from 12 y ago.
I searched for the "more gameplay mechanics equals more fun" video and found THIS VIDEO FIRST.
Not just that, but every time I search something up, I get two actual videos related to what I want then a vomit of youtube shorts and then a random section for "recommended" but completely unrelated videos
Seriously. They already spam that in my side bar, why clog up the searches with that too?
That's the experience I have lately. I can know exactly what I'm looking for and be unable to find it.
There shouldn't have to be a fix in the first place, but if you want to not have to scroll through "related" or "recommended" videos, you have to use the filter and click "videos". Then you'll just see stuff based on your search
I've found that if you copy paste before:2025 after your search it stops showing unrelated videos
I tried it too, same results. What grinds my gears is the stupid "People also watched" section. Like dude, I can't even get the video I want to watch, why do I care what other people are watching??
copy pasting this advice everywhere in the comments:
Try adding before:[current year + 1] at the end of the search to eliminate the "for you" and "people also watched" garbage.
For example: since the year that this comment is written is 2024, type in before:2025
it may not completely fix the search function, but the results will be better.
I hate that searching basically regressed everywhere, if I have something specific in mind you simply can't search for it anymore.
Same, I grew up as a 2000s kid and the problem for us was that WE HAD TOO MANY OPTIONS!!!! But we were able to search for what we wanted and find what we were looking for. More reasons why I think the Y2K Internet/UA-cam was better to what we have now and it all went down hill around the mid-2010s IMO.
I blame that on companies being more interested in advertising shit to you that you "might" like instead of just giving you what you searched for. The fact that the two or three top results in Google searches are sponsored pages that might not even be that relevant but are still prioritized over what you wanted should say a lot about where their priorities lie (hint: it's not the users, and it hasn't been in a long time.)
@@quinnjohnson9750 Y2K internet was 100% better than what we have now in terms of structure (of course, level of technology available is way better now). Social media is toxic & having an internet community structured around forums for specific interests, instead of catch-all social media platforms, was SO much better.
i recommend Qwant or Monocles for now, Qwant is decent and Monocles is basically a search engine aggregate that gets results from multiple engines
@@quinnjohnson9750 Bout the same time that stuff like cable and netflix all started to collectively shit themselves. Once they realized how profitable it was to produce dog shit content loaded with ads it was end-game. Same exact story with video games, all collectively got focused on monetization and online live-service games that will never hold together a community long term. Everything is to squeeze out gains now and it leaves a product that nobody even wants. They're playing themselves in the long run though.
"Video game that I haven't played yet review"
"Do you mean the ending?"
Me with every damn game ever.
It's surreal to me that YT is failing on such a large, profound frontier like this when once upon a time I could type lyrics of a song completely incorrect and still get the result I wanted.
From predatory, agressive and borderline (if not full on) NSFW advertisement to search function issues and unrelated searches, it's sad to see this platform fall so far.
YT needs to get it's shit together, because tacky bandaid fixes don't stop a sinking ship.
For real. I had just said this to someone else, but I was a big user of UA-cam from as far back as 2009 (this account I had made in 2013). I watched UA-cam go from a kind-of-cool video sharing website where people posted whatever they wanted, to being a content-oriented platform, to being a successful platform that launched so many careers, to kind-of-plateauing, to becoming generally disliked, to showing godawful obtrusive ads, to showing LITERAL P*RN ADS, to purposefully sabotaging the website for people who use ad blockers in order to avoid said ads (and also horror ads, I hate those and they're NEVER SKIPPABLE).
Watching UA-cam's rise and fall is probably one of the saddest things I've grown up with aside from like, trauma I guess lol. But seriously, I miss when UA-cam tried to be good! Like they actually used to TRY to make the website better, can you believe it? And now they're actively trying to push away hundreds of thousands of users just because we hate their ads! Wtf!
It's because it's profitable for UA-cam to do this. UA-cam is tweaked to maximise time on platform so that they can extract the maximum amount of surplus value from the viewers. Letting you search and find the one specific video you want turns out to not be the best way to achieve that goal. You're not supposed to be satisfied and happy, you're supposed to be stuck.
UA-cam and similar platforms have all realised that it's more important to be able to change what you want in order to keep you interested and "hooked" than it is to simply give you what you want and then let you go about your day. If you search for "techno feudalism" you'll find some good analysis of this modern cloud platform landscape by the economist Yanis Varoufakis.
more like noah's ark. it's a monopoly.
No, it needs to be replaced, but that's easier said than done, or it'd have been done over a decade ago.
@@imEden0yeeeaaaah no.
1. Monopolys are so illegal that not even disney is able to get past that law yet.
2. Even the greatest boat can still sink if the captain is enough of a dumbass. Sadly NOTHING is idiot proof.
You know what's ALSO insane? When I'm watching a numbered series on a channel and UA-cam just... forgets the number 7 exists and I have to search for 15 minutes to find part 7 if I'm not on a playlist.
ive had to do that so many times, it drives me crazy.
That's why I love youtubers who link the videos in the description or a pinned comment.
YES this!! I love when I’m on part 8 of a series and UA-cam recommends part 10 (instead of part 9) AND part 65, conveniently spoiling the story twist with the thumbnail :))
Oh my god. This is so true. It is always missing that one freaking episode no matter what you are watching even if you type it in directly sometimes.
Also happens frustratingly often with ordered songs in an OST. I don’t care if only 1 and 3 are the most popular of the four, I want them IN ORDER!
I also hate it when you get like 10 videos down it doesn’t even look like it’s searching for what you put anymore. It’s like just random stuff
if you look up the sfm version, prozd's original skit comes up on top result and the sfm version comes in 2nd
thats ridiculous
I mean if looking for what you want gets you something different
Get what you want by searching something different instead!
I've noticed this for ages now. I don't search for videos anymore. I search for channels and then have to find the video there. I also had no idea the filter existed. I hate it so much. I hope this gets more views and UA-cam does something to fix their search function.
I'm amazed that you're able to find channels you search for. I sure can't.
being a Google company, YT probably has the same mind virus as their A.I. products... that made news yesterday, when asked for pictures of U.S. founding fathers... making their search results a hot pile of unusable garbage
I knew the filters were there but they’re useless if you’re looking for something new- like if I’m looking off a certain sort of video on a certain subject none of those filters are useful to me
I fucking hate it 😓😓😓
they definitely won't but maybe they'll remove seeing how many subscribers someone has!
Which is annoying when I can’t remember the name of the channel but do remember a related channel but they got rid of the “other channels” tab too(?)
Reuplods and the "rewatch videos youve seen section even though ur SEARCHING SOMRTHING ELSE UNRELATED" section
You can block those unrelated sections with the Ublock extension, right click and press "block element" and it does it for all of those unrelated sections everytime I do searches. Still, I wish I did not have to use extensions to bring back things we used to get by default!
Lifesaver @@WordsRelyReal
@@vanilla7349 Glad I could help!
It feels like every page on UA-cam is slowly becoming the home page. The search results give you videos related to what you've already watched or what other people look at. The sidebar recommendations are either full of videos from channels you're subscribed to or random stuff instead of something related to what you're watching. At some point, UA-cam must have calculated they could increase their revenues by breaking their own site.
And the home page itself is a lot more static and inflexible than it used to be. Refreshing used to give a completely new set of videos, now it does squat.
I don't even have a home page feed; since they tied the recommendations to the watch history, it gives me zero videos.
It used to be random, and it was kind of fun. But now it's useless!
I feel like my recommendations are basically just the regular front page you get without logging in. Add on 30sec videos that have 10 views.
It feels like they don't trust their users to figure out how to use the site. If I want to see channels I'm subbed to, I'll go to my subscriptions page. I don't need to see them in the search results when I'm trying to find one specific video from a channel I'll never watch again.
even individual playlist pages too! they put a bunch of random videos underneath the ones actually in the playlist, the first time I saw it I was like how did these get in here?? and they load in before most of the playlist does
im dying laughing because i just searched the exact same thing you did, and the gameplay mechanics video didnt come up BUT THIS ONE DID
yeah I've noticed this for a while, really sucks they try to make it all algorithm based and 'for you'. If I wanted curated content I WOULD STAY ON THE HOME PAGE!
if you really don't want curated search then your on the wrong platform, but you can always go on incognito and find none curated searches
they also come up quick in the search.
Amen bro.
It's not even curated. I'm almost never logged in, and youtube still does this. It's recent - I noticed it 1-2 years ago when I couldn't find a ton of Gianni Matragrano videos anymore (example: search "he's got a tummy ache").
Only google works for these, which is ironic bc they're owned by the same company 💀
is anyone else getting the click baiting videos like "this video will play after 3 ads"? There are so many of those content farms that just buy channels to post that.
Google: Began as search engine, can't even do searching right anymore.
UA-cam: Began as a video site. Can't even play videos right anymore.
Me: Began as a person, can't even human right anymore.
That's what happens when you try to transform a search engine into a brainwashing vector!
Used to be able to find what I actually look for, not push ecommerce sites on me for the equivalent of 3 to 5 pages. Yeah, the idiots resorted to endless scroll now.
At least not like FB where it shows almost nothing relevant to what I searched. Only shows my wall posts or articles I commented on. 😂
Take the search away from the search engine and it just becomes an engine. Chugging along forever to rake in the money.
"Cherry blossom houses in minecraft tutorial"
"One man one jar"
“How to beat Master King Koco trial in Sonic Frontiers”
“1 toothpick 1 lunatic”
Searchs "Cute fluffy animal videos to relax"
Gets "Guro compilation"
LITERALLY
i had the same experience:(
I have thought the same thing for MONTHS, I'm so glad you addressed it. Amen to all. I'm sorry this is happening to you!
> search for "cute cat videos"
> find 6 cute cat videos
> "You may also like these videos"
> gore
all my "you may also like these videos" is either really gross material (lots of pimple popping or ingrown toenails??) or trypophobia, it's insane
@@iristigerlilyor a new boen with a syndrome that changes his body or something
EXACTLY it makes me sick, also on phone specifically because they are always shorts and take up the whole screen I hate using UA-cam
@@iristigerlilyDanny got traumatized by trypophobia to the point where she had to write endo of a character using those images as a basis to cope. And this is before they saw the Justice League issue that didn't show inside a character... now endo is ruining their life too.
There are current inquests into the responsibility of social media sites to curate their content and protect their users from such things, given the cases of these videos inspiring people to hurt others or themselves.
Please try and contact any news agencies, legal connections, or local politicians about this issue. This is a global issue about exposing millions of unsupervised children to incredibly harmful content, said content often being of severe crimes that are unreported, and said content encouraging more similar acts to occur. This is a serious issue, and we should treat it as one.
I'm happy that a bigger UA-camr is talking about this. Because I've been telling people that it's extremely hard to grow as a small channel because you could type in the name of your video verbatim and not find it. Just like you showed, even if you type in your username.
i can literally type my username in verbatim and i'll get results for literal foxes instead half the time
@schizoposter1499 There's always one asswipe in the comments. Here you are!
@schizoposter1499 🤣🤣🤣🤣 Damn bro 😭
This isn't new, but it does seem to be getting worse.
Several years ago, I ran the verbatim-search experiment with a channel called "FreedomToons"--specifically, its video titled _"Free" Birth Control_. I got pages and pages of less-popular results related to birth control.
That video may have been suppressed due to political reasons, but it demonstrates that UA-cam has long had its thumb on the scale when deciding which videos to show first.
@schizoposter1499grilled his ass
So hilarious story. I opened this but didn't play it, saw the title of the video you were searching for and decided to watch it. Went to watch it, had the EXACT problem you're talking about, ended up searching for it directly on your channel to find it. Then after watching it came here and you talked about the exact problem I just had.
Lmaooo
I didn't think I'd get the exact same problem until I tried, what the hell. I still couldn't even find the video after scrolling for ages but if I type it on google it shows up as the first result......
I just did that but I got this video before the original one lmao
Legitimately I've had to stop using the youtube search entirely because not only will it give me things that are unrelated to my search, it's also prone to giving disturbing results randomly even while logged out in a private/incognito window. The worst thing I've ever personally seen in the results was when I was looking for instant pot recipes a few months back and got recommended one of those super intense pimple popper blackhead videos, which I have literally never watched and have actively avoided cause I think they're nasty.
I've seen those exact same fcking disgusting pimple videos recommended too
Fcking ridiculous
The appeals policy is done by AI, which I think tells you everything that you need to know
UA-cam is going to Hell
@Rache-bd7sj And they sure aren’t doing it in a handbasket… more on the Titanic
even if it were made by humans, I wager it wouldn't make much of a difference.
@SteveSummers-ln1vr I’m stealing that line for future use
They've been using AI algorithms before it was "cool"
Thank you I remember looking for crochet and legit finding dead animal carcases, sh*ts ridiculous
Another commenter mentioned this. It’s terrible
i tried to find an upload of a police officer getting harassed by turkeys and i got an uncensored dashcam video of a woman being run over by a tractor-trailer. how does this even happen
How?!?
When I search for minecraft videos, I get shorts on HD of people taking out pimples or other face stuff. Gross, horrible, what the fuck-
Yep. I tried searching for a music video once and the fourth result was a gore video with a heartbreaking thumbnail. Needless to say, I got traumatized and never tried searching anything again.
Just tested all the steps he showed here and can confirm the exact same results. Absolutely awful that this happens.
Same here
Ditto for me
I obtained the same result as well
I got it to be second result with this search:
prozd wgg delivery game mechanic
same here
Google can practically read my mind with its suggestions.
Yet youtube can't get stuff as simple as I don't want to watch "how to fix a squeaky door" again every day for the rest of my life.
It's some kind of bizarre comedy that UA-cam shows you a re-upload of your own content with 140 views before getting close to showing you the original video.
It’s even worse for smaller creators. If you try to search a UA-cam name, they don’t pop up half the time until you start digging. Then you attempt to type in a video title of theirs with their name and they’re still the 7th option in the results page
I've had some of my videos show up as links to embeds(of the actual video) on forum sites or the like BEFORE the actual video itself shows up in the list.
"No-one even knows about this pretty much,"
The truest of statements.
Everyone should migrate to something like Odysse
I only just found out you could sort by views from this video
They hide features which they don't want to continue supporting for whatever reason. That way they can get rid of the feature after a few years and claim it's because no-one was using it.
I am someone who knows about how to use the search filters to help find things but I still have problems because YT refuses to show me videos related to what I am searching for after the first few results even with filters on. It's impossible.
They are breaking search on purpose because of some black box algorithm that tells them it will make them more money somehow. They probably have no comprehensive idea how it works. Theoretically, the algorithm could be misreporting its own effectiveness to YT and nobody would know the difference.
They took away usefulness and will try to sell it back to us with AI features. Also don't forget the environment cost of AI search is way worse than the old search we used to have. Business Insider: "Every 20 to 50 questions, ChatGPT servers need to "drink" the equivalent of a 16.9 oz water bottle. (...) While training GPT-3 in its data centers, Microsoft was estimated to have used 700,000 liters - or about 185,000 gallons - of fresh water. That's enough water to fill a nuclear reactor's cooling tower, per Gizmodo, and the same amount that is used to produce 370 BMW cars or 320 Tesla vehicles, per the study.”
It doesnt even work on phones.
This video came up in my recommended, so I watched it and was reminded of the gameplay mechanics video, so I wanted to watch it. I searched the name of that video and THIS VIDEO was the second result after the animated one
I actually found the video "games that think more gameplay mechanics equals more fun" as the FIRST result when I searched that phrase through Google's search rather than UA-cams own search-bar. That is absurd.
That makes perfect sense. Google did its job and got you to UA-cam. UA-cam is doing its job and using AI to keep people on the site as long as possible, regardless of how it changes the functionality.
@@mmseng2 why would I stay on UA-cam if I want to watch a particular video and it's easier to leave UA-cam to find it?
I'm being incentivized to leave the website to find what I want. When that happens a user is far less likely to go back.
I’ve noticed this for a while, it’s easier to search for a video on Google’s website rather than UA-cam
dont use the google search engine btw
@@usernametaken017 why not
there are so many old videos on UA-cam that are completely inaccessible now because there's no way to navigate to them
True, as a self described "Internet Historian" and love looking back on the old Y2K era of UA-cam in the 2000s, looking for old videos from the time is a nightmare and I consider it a miracle from God if a nonpopular video from the 2000s era is found. I at times have to type in the years like for example "2007 ghost videos" for example to get a decent search result.
@@quinnjohnson9750 use the "before:2008" tag at the end of your search.
I'm trying to find a specific video that just doesn't turn up anymore, not even if I filter by "watched." Before today, I figured it might have simply been deleted or privated, but now I'm honestly willing to bet it's still there and YT outright refuses to pull it up when I search for it. There has definitely been a steady decline in the quality of the YT search engine and algorithm for at least a year, now.
I had to write the channel name exclusively because an old solid vocaloid translyics still had most their videoes up, it gave me a scare when the titles did nothing. It's insane how useless youtube's search function has become.
@@mayhare9754100% agreed
Finally someone's talking about this!! It's damn near impossible to find videos since UA-cam always shoves completed unrelated videos from my normal reccomended section! It seriously sucks, especially when you're trying to find videos about obscure games or media and the results just won't stop showing unrelated garbage!!
Yes they keep trying to show me news channels... 🙄
Others have tried but are being censored. That’s something else that needs a video: the censorship. Not sure what AI they’re using to filter comments, but it sucks.
@@Smethells2023What I hate is UA-cam never notifies you in any way of what they do. No "we removed this comment of yours" or "this youtuber deleted your comment" email. The comment doesn't even disappear, the only way you can tell the comment is gone is by editing it and trying to repost it. If it shows a generic error message then it's been deleted.
I tried searching "games that think more gameplay mechanics equals more fun" on google, and it did actually show his video as the first result. Pretty stupid that such a solution is necessary, but if you're after a specific video that might be one way to find it.
especially when for some reason NSFW content shows in search result
I'm surprised YT hasn't yet released a premium search feature that has actual functionality yet
youtube really needs a rival. they can do whatever they want only because they own the entire market. if there's a competitor i bet they'll think twice before making any stupid and annoying decision like these past few years...
True
SO REAL OMG
no one can realistically afford to be a competitor. people want the freedom to upload 2+ hour long videos on youtube. who else can afford to let users do that for FREE besides google? the sheer amount of server space required to do this is crazy.
@@Mishakeet exactly. and then to even keep afloat, you need moderation and, unfortunately, some form of monetization else a competitor can't even pay server bills. If going down the advertiser route, now you have to worry if advertisers think your platform is worth spending money on, because initially, no one is on your platform. Same deal with content creators who are subject to the network effect.
beleive it or not, capitalism breeds the opposite of competition... that's not gonna happen, upkeep is too much money.
I love the fact that when u search for something now and scroll down far enough you’ll just get your WATCH HISTORY, and whatever videos you haven’t finished, like jesus christ the search engine can’t even give me results based on my search by title, it just gives me what I ALREADY am watching.
Actually switched over to Bing this week. Crazy actually being able to search things and get an answer without having to add "reddit" to the end of my question
Mannn I wish that were the case for me. I switched to bing last month because google search is utter garbage... but bing isn't much better. Even when I add quotations or alter the phrasing, a lot of times it's still hard to find what I'm actually searching for.
100% Microsoft needs to make a good video hosting platform and take over. I'm getting to fed up with Google after being loyal to them for so long. I used all their products and now I'm slowly phasing each one out. (Chromebook, Chromecast, Pixel, Chrome, UA-cam)
I wish I could say that Bing is any better. Looking past the atrocious UI/UX. Firefox is the closest to being helpful and Brave tries to sell the illusion of privacy and safety (same with Opera but badly)
@@ekuude
I started using Brave. It’s not amazing, but I feel more confident the results won’t be skewed during elections.
Google is unusable.
I switched to Yandex and despite half of the search results not even being in English, I usually find there, what I'm looking for.
This video about how the game mechanics video is hard to find now actually shows up before the actual video shows up in the search results for me
I think the new search system might also be the reason I keep getting shown disgusting gore/body horror thumbnails when I’m searching for completely unrelated and innocuous terms. I’ve gotten multiple of those stupid skin trypophobia images, images of fake-looking, overly grotesque skin conditions, and just the other day I saw what was quite literally just the severed head of a seagull. I’m very sensitive to body horror and gore, and I also have intrusive thoughts that get worse when I see that kind of stuff, so it really does screw with me. I’ve started reporting those videos, I hope that stops soon.
SAME. I don't know what else to do. I'm also reporting these videos
OMFG YES CAME HERE JUST TO COMMENT THIS AND NOTHING SEEMS TO FIX IT.
Yes, extremely repulsive thumbnails for videos with spurious content, get recommended alongside any serious topic I search. That stuff needs its own content safety filter! The thumbnails alone qualify as traumatic viewing. I never watch that crap, yet UA-cam promotes it as suggested "For You", right next to the non-sensationalistic content I'm searching for.
Same, I can't believe noone is adressing this yet, at least not that I've seen. It's just insane!
Same. These are the worst. I have never clicked on a gore video in my life, but now they show up every single time I search for something.
Something that happened to me recently:
I remember a song
I search it
Only the music video shows up
I search the same but with "audio"
The audio only version does show up but it's a re-upload
I click on the re-upload and the audio uploaded by the Artists channel shows up on the right
Amazing
E
The proper Irigy Hónaljmirigy Numerakirály song video both existing and not existing at the exact same time:
Once upon a time, I would finish cooking, sit down, open youtube, and find an interesting video in less than a minute. Now I have to previously prepare a playlist with the videos, otherwise my food would get cold while scrolling to find something I actually care about watching.
I also have to say, it's not just youtube's fault by trying to show me what they think I like, it's also the videos itself.... it's so difficult to find a youtuber doing what they like in a sea of people trying to beat the algorithm and be as trendy/clickbaity as posible. Now that everyone knows that you could get rich by doing this, everyone is trying to grab your attention for views and money. I'm so tired, it's not a pleasant feeling looking for videos on youtube anymore, it's pain
Find people you like and subscribe. It's the only thing keeping me out of this terrible issue of the search and recommendations.
this is so wholesome to watch, trust me.
I have been desperate to find certain videos in the context of a research about events around a German UA-camr that went insane at some point.
That got me started to look into what caused the decline of google's searching engine and the point with this iceberg is that it is so hard to find any hint on wether other people suffer this problem aswell either because no one talks about it or because those results are filtered/ low prioritized for some reason whatsoever (active banning?/Changes in the algorithm?/"Optimization" or customization of search requests?).
Thank you for your contribution and affirmation tho.
I use UA-cam a fair bit for tutorial videos, but there's little to no way of finding what i need in the search bar. So i search on duckduck go then go to videos and what i need comes up. More of it at least.
The home page isnt any better, suddenly out of nowhere within the last few weeks ive just been bombarded with videos ive never shown an interest in, many of which are only a minute or two, i once had to hit the not interested button on like 6 posts in a row
yesss. and if you refresh it, it will be the same videos again. if i didn't watch it the first 40 times you recommended it, i won't watch it now! i have to turn on post notificantions for the people i subscribe to as well. i could watch every video they've uploaded for the past 5 years and youtube still won't recommend their new videos. oh yeah, and youtube shorts, AKA the same 5 creators on a loop along with random videos that have 0 likes for a good reason.
I've been recommended the air safety videos of Air India several times this week it's so annoying. I don't live in India and haven't watched any India or flight related videos recently, so I have no idea why it keeps doing that
i did get recommended this on home
not defending it or anything
I've brought this up to people before. The search function didn't use to serve recommended videos, but now that it does, it seems the only reliable search for lost videos in my watch history...
It's the same with Web Search. In the old days the results would point to pages that actually contained the words that you searched for. Now the way it works is: "You type some words, press Enter, and our AI wills serve you some recommendations based on those words you typed." (relevance not guaranteed; in fact there is guaranteed to be much irrelevant nonsense containing only _antonyms_ of your search terms)
nah searching your history ain't any better i've tried that a few times and you either have to be super specific or input the exact title of the vid and even then sometimes it won't show you the vid you're looking for just vids with similar titles that you only watched 2 secs of before clicking off
...and it also happens to be the only playlist/collection that has a search functionality implemented for it. Insanity
History search is really bad. It shows only ~10 random results
I just like videos I want to come back to to save it like a bookmark or something
I'm legit scared of the search page now. If I scroll too far down I'm bound to find something disturbing and be mentally scarred like I have already
Exactly. It’s good to know I’m not the only one. Lots of comments on here expressing concerns about the same thing - UA-cam shoving creepy, disturbing, brain rot type material in front of us.
Here after your recent video, and I admire the depth of your sciencing in this one! You did find it! After, I'm sure, pulling out every hair on your head individually.
UA-cam is not the only Google product with a terrible search engine -- Gmail can be astoundingly frustrating
Not to mention how utterly ugly its logo is
I've discovered this as well. Oh, how the mighty have fallen...
I used to have a data entry job that involved finding receipts and stuff in our company's gmail accounts, and this is too real
I once typed in a guys name and got no results. Typed in his first name only, still no results. Typed in his company and found the email thread with his email address that had his full name in. What is wrong with the search engine!
@@arandomcheese ive had the same problem, but with me trying to find emails about my prescription refills. It is so bad
So much stuff is being Memory Holed because of this. The biggest issue is that it mixes in recommendations with the search results, and just gives up after 5 incorrect videos. "Ahh... I can't be bothered looking for more. Why don't you just take this unrelated Asmongold video instead?"
Omg I'm so tired of asmogold showing up on the most unrelated search even though I said don't recommend channel.
@@matthewcharles9813I love Asmon. It's recommending him because I watch everything he posts, but I was looking for something specific... You can literally write the title correct word by word, and it still refuses to do it. It's a huge problem, honestly.
Nice GW2 icon 😊
Seriously I have to dig through my history just to find something I just saw. Searching does nothing
@@DeathnoteBB Bro so true. I get much better "search results" going through my history then actual UA-cam or Google.
I hate that half the time I just have to open a new tab and Google the video I’m looking for. And it actually comes up. But not when I type it into the search bar of the website it comes from. Magnificent. Thank you, UA-cam.
diffrent searches after all
@@bluegamer4210 it shouldn’t be.
5 months later, to no surprise, YT's search function is still abysmal and infuriating.
The struggle of trying to find relevant videos on UA-cam is too real. The search function needs serious help.
Are you kidding? I mean, you're right, but you're also a scam channel. People just thumbed you up because checkmark and they're dumb. With bought subs and an AI voice, too. You're part of the problem. Pathetic.
ETH in your name = Ethereum = Cryptocurrency = You are copying comments so you can scam people! Guilty until proven innocent.
oh god what poor soul's channel did you hack?
The Whole UA-cam site needs serious help
just put "before:2025" at the end of your search
Of course, nothing is stopping Google from improving this. They just don't want to.
you'd be suprised
But they'll make ads the most intrusive things ever by first hiding the yellow markers for them, then making 15 second unskippable ads, and making it so that they shove a banner down your throat over the comments and video description and you have to go out of your way to get rid of it
"Improving". Implying it's not intentional. UA-cam search DID work, until 1-2 years ago at least. Been on YT since 2006, and while it has improved, it feels like they're morally obligated every few years to design something *_everyone_* hates.
It's not even like they're shadowbanning adult content; it happens to safe videos too. This is a weird af experiment.
@@BreakdancePeach I feel like companies would rather reduce the quality in order to keep random people employed because if they reached a good satisfaction level, what else would they need to fix?
@@BreakdancePeach there's games that do this too, mainly with sound where the quality drops and then spikes
UA-cam is a shining example of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
They just can't stop "fixing" things.
The frustrating thing is that it was really good at some point. I remember regularly using youtube search for my questions (like "how to do x"), now it is completely useless. Nowadays, I google my question and look at the videos tab or find a youtube link in a forum or so. It is really sad.
I feel that they do the, "I am bored, lets break it"-strategy
Still pissed they got rid of the visible downvotes system just because some companies cried that they were losing out on profits when fans showed their dislike of a product. Now it hurts the non-corporate side of UA-cam because you can no longer tell if a video is giving wrong information. This is a pretty big deal with home repair videos
I’ll search the names of pretty popular creators a lot and have to scroll down for awhile to actually find the account, if at all. There’s so many times I’ve thought a channel was deleted cause I couldn’t find it in the search, it’s crazy
god i felt like i was going crazy. ive been watching youtube pretty much every day since 2015 or so, and i swear the search and recommended functions werent this bad till now.
literally just like 5 minutes ago, i wanted to listen to something while i did my animal crossing dailies, and youtube kept showing me the same 10 videos over and over for some reason. ive been trying to use the subscriptions tab more and more but old habits die hard lol
yeah omg i cant believe its not just me ?? like ,, the youtube home page is just showing me the same videos over and over and over ?? why ??? no matter how much i refresh ?? its the same exact videos ??
Same, Why does YT think I want to watch the same video over and over again? Its insane!
@@quinnjohnson9750 It even does this with random, dog shit video creators who have no views or subscriber base and terrible videos. And stuff that totally does not interest me will stay in my feed FOREVER unless I click not interested or do not recommend channel. It's insane. The site truly is slowly dying.
@@cloverlovania on a platform that is twenty years old. they got PLENTY of other videos to show you, they just don't want to.
Unfortunately I am pretty sure the subscriptions tab has also for years already had problems with not showing videos by some creators, even though you may be subscribed to them. I don't use the tab as often anymore, but I know for a fact that multiple creators have noticed these problems over the years and never have seen UA-cam adress this
I have noticed the exact same issue with one of my videos. It is my most popular video with 25 million views, but it does not show up when searching, even when adding my username to it.
I’m glad it’s not just me, but baffled and frustrated that it’s seemingly a wider problem
Extremely strange
i just searched the video you're referring to and was expecting to be like "idk this seems like bait to get me to search for this person's video" and i expected to be able to come back here and be like "you're a liar" but... nope, you're right. if i type your username and the title of the fucking video you are referring to, it does not show up. if i google the same exact term it's the TOP RESULT. what the hell, why
Hot damn, you're right. UA-cam even autofills with its name, but when you actually search it, you get latest from your channel (which is obviously incorrect), then the wrong vid, the wrong vid, the wrong vid, something from your MUSIC channel, some OTHER video with 2300 views that has the title and your name but isn't it, then the People Also Watched section which is hell, then the wrong video, the wrong video, the wrong video, the wrong video, the wrong video, the For You section which is just the front page but smaller, then a REACTION to the wrong video, then the wrong video, then the Previously Watched section which is completely worthless, then the wrong video, then SOMEONE ELSE'S animation, then the wrong video, then a cut clip with 20 views, then a SPANISH DUB OF THE CORRECT VIDEO.
It takes scrolling all the way down to your BEST OF playlist to finally find something that actually has THE VIDEO THAT WAS SEARCHED FOR.
This is so true!! the search function has been broken for a good while and it is sad!!
Also there's the weird horrible things that appear in the " People also watched" section when you search a video... I have been searching sewing tutorials to start to learn the craft as a hobby and the "people also watched" section was riddled with disgusting thumbnails of faces with gigantic black heads, a child screaming with someone with tweezers in their ears and a title like "you wonldn't believe what was in her ear", another thumbnail of goat and a man with a machete over the animal's head, and overall GROSS stuff, I have NEVER EVER have searched or watched a video like that before, I didn't watched the videos when the were presented in the "people also watched" and I will never EVER watch them even if other people have watched them so WHY is the algorithm putting those there????
But more important: How the F are those videos related to learning how to sew?!?!?! And now I haven't been searching videos about sewing because I don't want to see those disgusting thumbnails ever again!
Another thing: I am partially deaf so I rely on the subtitles to watch content in UA-cam and any other plataform, when I am watching the videos in my TV (samsung with Tizen, or dumb tv with chromecast) each time UA-cam puts an ad in a video the subtitles get deactivated and you have to activate them again each time an ad was placed (and with the increased number of ads being served is a PITA), but even worse sometimes it won't even give you the optioin to reactivate them unless you close the app and restart it.
I've experienced those weird gross unrelated video recs as well! The same ones you described! Unnerving and puzzling.
And for some reason, when you see them in search results you can't click "not interested". Wouldn't it make sense to be able to "tune" the search by culling unwanted results?
OMG I also keep getting those gross video suggestions when searching for origami tutorials, the thumbnails will forever be burned in my memory ;-;
@@geckovonparsley8200 that's the most horrible thing! you can't hide them, you can't use the "not interested" or the " Don't recommend channel" it is really horrible!!
@@anyvander7824 so in general it is a plague of the arts and crafts section of UA-cam, which is disturbing because what would happen if a child searchs for origami, sewing, etc.? are they going to be exposed to those horrible things??
UA-cam logic
Literal abuse and gore of baby animals: Ah yes, perfectly acceptable! Let’s put this in everyone’s recommended!
Robots making spam videos and stealing other videos: Amazing! Let’s give them thousands of dollars!
A random meme video with no offensive content at all: UNACCEPTABLE!! HOW EVIL
Leaving a comment after the YT’s “update”
I thought I was just having issues on my end with certain videos not coming up when I very specifically searched for them. Amazing.
You have to be just vague enough with the barest hint kf specifics to land in the ballpark of whatever it is you wanted
Me: searches up cute cat videos
UA-cam: People also watched this, you may like it.
shows NSFW and disturbing content
copy pasting this advice everywhere in the comments:
Try adding before:[current year + 1] at the end of the search to eliminate the "for you" and "people also watched" garbage.
For example: since the year that this comment is written is 2024, type in before:2025
@@solinus7131 ty brother
@@solinus7131I tried this by typing in “crochet flower 2025” and it didn’t work :(
@@solinus7131it worked for another I searched tho!
@@solinus7131lol magic fix?
Google's reverse image search is garbage now too. You have to go through multiple clicks and their advertiser nonsense to even get it to work like it should.
THIS. As a designer, I need to constantly backtrack on clients' references, and it takes hours to do something that took seconds and minutes before.
I hate that you can no longer search for an image and a keyword
Using the old reverse image search, recently I’ve had tons of scam(?) sites pop up that just rehost images from other sites (and sells them? never clicked on them), never the original sites themselves which has been horrible, and I can’t figure out what to search to see if other people have the same issue and if there’s a way to fix it (probably not)
yeah, I don't know if you can even call that pile of dung a search function. It gives you a few somewhat related results and immediately goes: "but now, look at this totally unrelated crap, it's great"
Yt search is now the bane of my existence!! Even worse when looking for very specific/obscure terms, and the algorithm breaks and shows me random videos that are either gross or wildly unrelated. I get morbidly skinny eugenia cooney videos recommended for CROCHET TUTORIALS, and I get disgusting pimple/injury/open wound videos for ASMR searches. I hate it here
THAT IS EXACTLY MY ISSUE UGHHHHH I literally get reccomended the same shit and it's so triggering and gross
THOSE ARE THE ONES, I mentioned in another comment thread being pushed those exact same Eugenia Cooney videos but for me they appear in relation to sewing, not crocheting. For some reason the algorithm associates crafts with anorexia.
I don't know if there is a high overlap between people with those hobbies and people suffering with eating disorders or what but if I'm even close that means YT is actively pushing content that can harm people directly to the people most likely to be triggered by it and self harm as a result. I was hoping it was just a weird quirk of my algorithm but seeing others mention seeing the same thing is so worrying.
That in conjunction with the fact that youtube consistently refuses to honor user requests to not be recommend certain content makes this so dangerous.
Same problem here! I was looking for a cute crochet dragon tutorial but found a video of a person being attacked by a crocodile :/
Omg! I was looking at painting/drawing videos and she was getting recommended to me. So the entire art community is suffering from this huh?.
From what I remember yt doesn't really like art(using art as an umbrella term here) videos. So my best guess is that it's trying to recommended us videos that might make us click on it.
Just speculation
WOAH EXACTLY. wth is with these weird Eugenia Cooney uploads? I'll search like "hair colour tutorial" or "____ gameplay" and it recommends me videos from these super weird channels??? Like it's FILLED with them?
What's funny is that those search queries work perfectly in Google search, and give the correct video as top result. I almost never use UA-cam search but didn't realize just how bad it is until now
Man, if only Google would just buy UA-cam and fix its search function!
You know, instead of buying UA-cam and completely dismembering its search function.
In the words of ProZD himself:
"ALGORITHM!"
I’m glad someone is finally saying this because fuck me the UA-cam search function is unbelievably frustrating.
Let’s also talk about the suggested next to a video you’re watching. I’ll be rewatching a video from a series, look in the suggested for the next one, but it’s just a wall of unrelated stuff that I’ve already seen, stuff that I looked up the day before, and a few videos peppered in with 16 views about something I would never look up. I have to scroll so far down just to find another video from the same channel that I’m currently watching.
I can't have autoplay on because 9 times out of 10 it's some random twitch vod with double digit views. It's NEVER anything related, in order to see similar things I have to leave full screen and CHOOSE AN OPTION TO GIVE RELATED VIDEOS. That or just more from the same channel, because usually their "related" content is still dogshit. But I don't understand what the recommended videos are supposed to be if not related to what I'm currently watching
I've been getting a rash of Indonesian tech tutorial videos with less than 100 views
Sure I watch tech content but YT has no reason to think I know anything but English.
I wake up every now and then to trump debates from 2016 LMAO talk about nightmares
Yes! Because of Craptube crappy updates, I REFUSE to update the app because of those suggested videos at the end of video 🙄...
My favorite is when I'm watching a Let's Play series, and the next video plays, and it's not the next video in the series. Instead it's a different video in the series. Why? All of the videos are literally labeled: Game - # (title), it feels like it should pick up the fact that I'd want to watch episode 3 after episode 2, especially if I've saved the whole dang playlist to my library!
Thanks for talking about this with a big platform, I have been posting about this and even sending feedback to UA-cam to no avail for a while now. I literally can't find anything, and what new videos I do get recommended on the home screen seem tailor made to be annoying, irrelevant or controversial. The website is broken. I basically have to Google (ironic) any UA-cam video I want to see nowadays.
“Because UA-cam is dying. Bye!” Is my favorite sign off. I hope you keep using it!