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ScreamapillarAPI t1_isezc90 wrote

Will it not display recommended videos with the search results. This is the one thing that's seriously annoying me about YouTube these days. You want to search something about a general topic and maybe if youre lucky the first 2 videos are something related to what you search but then you have tonnes of completely unrelated videos based on your past viewership. It's so annoying they essentially blended in your content home feed with the search despite being two completely different features with different use cases in mind. I don't understand how an Alphabet company can screw up the act of searching this bad.

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FaryGagan t1_isf7q2a wrote

It drives me crazy too. Alphabet is in the advertising business now though, right? They have no stake in YouTube's functionality for the user, aside from delivering the advertisements they're paid to deliver. Why prioritize search functionality when it doesn't directly help bring in the money?

YouTube was content from the people and for the people. Now it's content from corporations and for corporations.

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ScreamapillarAPI t1_isfbxwu wrote

I get that and all and who knows maybe I'm outside whatever target user YouTube is capturing. It's just now it's seriously getting in the way of useability to a point it's actually making me disengage with the platform more often instead of keeping me glued on the site for prolonged periods. I rarely engage with recommended videos because YouTubes algorithm gets it wrong like 7/10 times for me and spews garbage at me (I delete my history and start from scratch sometimes to alleviate this).

If they want to keep me engaged when using search specifically then they should simply provide me content that I asked for in my search query and then after finding something and click to watch it, from there let the recommendations flow in to keep me clicking. I'm not going to be able to watch their ads for products Im never going to buy if they aren't giving me what I want through search easily.

It just seems so ass backward to me. Do the product owners/designers at YouTube believe the majority of it's user base are that easily distractable like we all have ADD. Where they will use search with the explicit goal of finding something specific only to immediately abandon that goal 2 seconds later after seeing something unrelated but from a creator they watched before.

This stuff seems like it's from a relatively newer update and as someone who constantly works with UX designers and love poking holes in their ideas in order to get to the best solution. I would love to somehow see the usage analytics data from this update on the search feature because I can't be the only one finding this completely unintuitive and disengaging.

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FaryGagan t1_isfhmse wrote

I hear you and completely agree.

I think it just matters a lot less to Alphabet if users like you or me are satisfied with search functionality, because we don't exactly have a choice when it comes to video sharing/viewing... unless it's on ANOTHER corporate owned platform that will inevitably shift more and more towards appeasing advertisers (such as reddit- we're seeing this site drive ads and content consumption more and more each passing year).

So what I'm saying is I'm with you- we used to have a BEAUTIFUL set of tools built up via the internet, but they were scooped up by systems that are designed to turn a profit. Good for business, bad for progress and growth. Maybe some people like that, but I hate it.

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Tuss36 t1_isfpvnu wrote

I share in this frustration. If I didn't click that video they've been shelling at me for the last three days on my homepage, I'm not gonna suddenly be interested when I'm searching for something different. Especially when it's a video I just finished, or clicked away with ten seconds left because the creator puts credits in.

The closest thing they've got to a "reasonable" thing in that field is how, on the recommended list that mimics your mess of a search result page, there's a list of tags on the top. If you click the one labeled "Related", it basically narrows the list down to what it should look like, rather than just your latest subscription feed, though they might sneak in there anyways but at least it's something. Though sometimes the tag doesn't show up so even that's not foolproof.

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dbxp t1_isfmyo7 wrote

At this point I'm starting to think it needs a third party index which provides search over the biggest channels and just links out to YouTube for the content.

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Alxssandro t1_isfdsyi wrote

>maybe if youre lucky the first 2 videos are something related to what you search but then you have tonnes of completely unrelated videos based on your past viewership

It's worse now, literally for EVERY search I make there are 3 unrelated videos, usually those that are trending, before I can find the pertinent ones. I don't get it, it's just annoying.

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Vicious_Hydragyrum t1_isf5o7a wrote

Open a new window in incognito mode then search on YouTube, thus it will see you with no past history and no cookies etc...

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elrugmunchero t1_isd3v3m wrote

How do I exclude terms?

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Enschede2 t1_ise1uf4 wrote

Precede it with a minus, it might still sometimes choose to ignore you tho

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Cycode t1_isf959n wrote

youtube is 99% of the time ignoring me doing it.. usually it is acting like i would had added a + not a -... it sucks so much that it's so i consistent.

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Enschede2 t1_isfan16 wrote

I know.. they keep doing it on purpose, sometimes it's only even possible to find a video via google search by specifying youtube.com, it's extremely annoying

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Cycode t1_isfci1q wrote

the most fucked up part about this all is.. if i use newpipe (android app) to search.. it is working WAY better. so they inject some fucky shit into the desktop client and their app to make it that bad. its so annoying. also they inject videos from my subbed youtubers.. even if the videos are about something unrelated to my search. god, i hate youtubes algorithm.

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Enschede2 t1_isfeljl wrote

Yea I dont know who makes these decisions at google, but it's like they purposefully try to make things worse, I mean the youtube dislike thing, and they also recently put the google images button under the dotted menu instead of next to search, which now is apparently news, books and shopping? Idk who tf uses that but okay..

It's especially bad when you gotta find programming things or something very specific and/or obscure, if it wasn't for the google verbatim extension I'd have lost all my hair already.

Sometimes even bing is better than google, and that's not because bing has improved lol (which it hasn't)

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Cycode t1_isfg72n wrote

sometimes, it feels to me like they have a dick-size comparisation at google.. who can programm the most annoying thing to screw with customers or something like this..

like we do it on programmerhumour where people code the most annoying way to input telephone numbers into a formular as a joke.. just that they do it for real @ google.

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Whoopaow t1_isfkxvg wrote

We're not the customers, that's the corporations that advertise. It's been said a million times, but we, the viewers, are the product.

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Cycode t1_isflht6 wrote

without the viewers, there is nobody to advertise to. so its important to make sure people keep watching. if you make it always worse and worse, this has the contrary effect you normally should intent.

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Whoopaow t1_isg72k6 wrote

Yeah, true, but they're basically a monopoly. They're so firmly engrained into the culture that I doubt that's a real fear for them. Which sucks.

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Enschede2 t1_isfigpt wrote

Yea, I mean the google graveyard is evidence of that, all it takes is 1 competent competitor and I feel like google would be in shambles.
Unfortunately all the competitors kinda suck too

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JakeEllisD t1_iseu9ff wrote

Example search pls

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GravitationalEddie t1_isey6ws wrote

intitle:pancakes -buttermilk -"you wont believe" -pinterest

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RHINO_Mk_II t1_isf27t7 wrote

Can I get a plugin that adds -"reacts" to all my YT searches and content?

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TheEthyr t1_isf7z7c wrote

You don't need a plugin.

OP's website basically creates queries of the form https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=<search terms>

You can essentially do the same thing in Chrome and Firefox using a customized search.

Firefox

Go to YouTube and search for -reacts. This will generate a query like above (i.e. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=-reacts. Then create a bookmark for this link. Now, go to Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks and click on the bookmark you just created. You can also go to Manage Bookmarks and manually create a bookmark from scratch. Either way, do the following.

Go to the URL and change it to https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s-reacts.

Next, go to the Keyword field and add a shortcut. You can call it anything you want. For example you can enter yt.

To use the bookmark, just go the brower's address bar and type yt, then space and any search terms. The browser will replace the %s in the bookmark with your search terms, then go to the resulting URL.

Reference: Firefox: How to use keywords with bookmarks

Chrome

Go to Chrome's settings and click on Search Engine. Scroll to Site Search. Click on Add.

Enter any descriptive text in Search Engine (e.g. YouTube no reacts). In Shortcut, enter yt or whatever keyword you want. In URL, enter https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s-reacts.

The click Add to save it.

Use it in the same way as Firefox.

Reference: Chrome: Add, edit, or remove site search shortcuts

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venxyle t1_isfdgtn wrote

Ah yes how I found all the gta 6 leaks on day 1 Full 90 minute videos with no reactions. Absolute legend for the rest too.

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Select_Repair_2820 t1_isf3rr3 wrote

Can I get a plugin that excludes all stock photo websites when I'm searching for an image on Google?

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matlynar t1_isf6wnr wrote

I have been using Bing for images for a while now. While some results aren't as interesting as google's, it does feature way less stock images in its results and that does it for me most of the time.

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[deleted] t1_isf84sl wrote

[deleted]

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u202207191655 t1_isfa2p0 wrote

ddg.gg

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[deleted] t1_isfczvh wrote

[deleted]

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u202207191655 t1_isfdzut wrote

Can't you? From my view I can. But perhaps that doesn't really work.

I haven't used google since a couple years. What's the functionality that you miss since the lawsuit(s)?

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Enschede2 t1_isftc90 wrote

Also quotations don't always have to be for searchterms that consist of several words, it can also be used when youtube/google decides that it doesn't know your searchterm and assumes you made a typo, then autocorrects you without asking.
Like searching for csrs, it would probably be changed to cars or something, if you'd type "csrs" however it should indicate you don't want it to be changed, also works well on google search in conjunction with verbatim mode, for which there is also an extension to force that by default

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Enschede2 t1_iseut80 wrote

I tried that but reddit changed the minus to a dot, but it's basically the search term you wanna exclude in "", and minus in front like -"unwanted"

This used to work always, however now it increasingly does not, it does still work for say excluding subscribed channels that are unrelated to the search by saying -"subscribed" or -subscribed, or you can say -"recommended"

Maybe there is a similar trick with intitle, not sure, just like ot used to work with google search, but they keep changing things, like it used to be +"searchword" +"includesecondword", but now it is "searchword" && "includesecondword"

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xadiant t1_isftygn wrote

Youtube has the worst fucking search function I've ever seen. First two or three videos are right, next three are the random ones I already watched, the rest are total nonsense. Hopefully I will remember to use this trick.

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Liv1ng-the-Blues t1_isl2qnt wrote

I know I won't remember. I'll have to write a note on my desktop..then have to remember where the note is.

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