[HN Gopher] To improve search results on YouTube, use the search...
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To improve search results on YouTube, use the search prefix
"intitle:"
Author : normhill
Score : 148 points
Date : 2022-07-05 16:10 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (xn--1-zfa.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (xn--1-zfa.com)
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Meta: It seems that HN lists the Punycode for this website's
| domain (xn--1-zfa.com), instead of the actual IDN that's
| displayed by the browser (a1.com). This feels kind of odd to me.
|
| [Punycode] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
|
| [IDN] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
| asciiresort wrote:
| It poses a security risk and exploited to phish people.
|
| Modern Browsers sanitize punycode, not so sure about bespoke
| browsers that live inside other mobile apps
| INTPenis wrote:
| Depends on your view. People who wotk with DNS want to see the
| actual domain, while end users might prefer the translation.
| teddyh wrote:
| People who work with DNS know how to right-click and do "Copy
| Link", or even to hover over a link and watch the status bar
| text.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Well, HN is a link aggregator, not a DNS tool.
| random314 wrote:
| The top results are typically copies of the original video you
| searched for, with padding to increase length of the video.
| slig wrote:
| YouTube's search is horrible. No, I don't want "related results"
| that are completely unrelated to my query, neither results from
| my country when I specifically type in English and my whole UI is
| in English and I never watch non-English content while logged in.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > neither results from my country
|
| Might be related to some local law or simply pressure from
| lawmakers, eg Canada is experimenting with such a law:
| https://www.medianama.com/2022/06/223-canada-bill-streaming-...
| kmfrk wrote:
| One of the craziest things about YouTube search I don't
| understand is how you'll search for the name of someone, and
| their channel won't show up in the first results. Sometimes,
| often really, it won't show up at all, and you'll have to
| figure out other ways to phrase your queries. You kind of need
| to go with a long channel name that can be abbreviated like
| "Bob65's Engineering tricks", so people have the full name as a
| fallback, in case "bob65" doesn't work.
|
| Feels like they really want you to subscribe and engage with
| the "related" videos instead of the real deal, which sucks for
| channel owners, especially if it's channels who profit on being
| weirdly intrusive and hostile towards said channels or people.
| davisoneee wrote:
| Firefox plugin to remove distracting crap[2] such as 'related
| results' on search pages.
|
| [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-
| recom...
| arkitaip wrote:
| If you use uBlock Origin you can remove most cruft by adding
| these rules to Settings > My filters:
| youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element youtube.com###hover-
| overlays youtube.com##yt-icon.ytd-badge-supported-
| renderer youtube.com###related
| youtube.com###donation-shelf
| dmix wrote:
| Thanks I tried it out and the setting is called "Hide Inapt
| Search Results" (it's on by default but it also disables
| recommendations everywhere by default so you might need to
| disable the other options).
| bdowling wrote:
| YouTube's search is carefully optimized to keep viewers
| watching video after video, and ad after ad, for as long as
| possible. That's why the search returns popular videos, ones
| that suck in viewers, rather than ones that match your search
| terms.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| At least the algorithm isn't totally amnesic; no other site
| remembers that content can have enduring relevance.
| doliveira wrote:
| I'm actually finding myself watching YouTube less and less
| because of this. If we were to anthropomorphize the AI, I'd
| say it's trying pretty desperately to bring me to a "popular
| cluster".
| danuker wrote:
| So do I. The only way I "get" content lately is to see what
| my subscriptions are up to. Search is effectively
| impossible.
|
| They might have a minus sign somewhere it shouldn't be.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| In my experience, its significantly more aggressive at this
| than it used to be. The only reason I have a Google/YouTube
| account in the first place is so I can go to youtube.com
| and see a list of reasonable interesting videos to watch,
| based on what I watched before. But in the last few months
| it keeps pushing more and more "popular" content in there,
| which is often complete drivel IMHO. I don't even mind if
| YouTube would show unrelated content, as long as it's
| interesting, but usually it's not. The entire reason
| YouTube wins out over regular TV is so I can avoid this
| kind of stuff.
|
| I've been flagging these things as "not interested" for
| months now, but it feels like fighting windmills because it
| has no discernible effect. The effect of all of this is
| that YouTube is a lot less useful to me than it used to be.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Last week youtube decided to start pushing pus / pimple
| popping videos, and push them hard. I've never shown
| interest, this was purely the algorithm's idea.
|
| Gross.
|
| I had to install an extension to get it to stop because
| "Not Interested" and "Don't Recommend Channel" don't work
| in search results, even though they are turning search
| results into just another front page :/
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I feel the same way. YouTube is by far my primary
| streaming platform of any kind (audio or video) and
| recently the algorithm's obsession with click bait is
| making it way less useful to me. This is leading me to
| watch Nebula and listen to podcasts a lot more. A couple
| of months ago I noticed a rapid change in the YouTube
| home page results. There is a channel I watch that
| uploads four videos or so every day and I always watch
| every single one immediately. Normally when I open the
| home page the latest video from that channel is at the
| very top of the list, and I usually click on it. Then one
| day it just wasn't! The channel was continuing to upload
| and grow in size but the algorithm decided to throw all
| kinds of low quality stuff at me, to the point I felt
| like I had been logged out even when I wasn't. I
| complained to YouTube on twitter and I don't know what
| happened but after about five days of this nonsense
| things returned to normal, but then began to slowly
| degrade again. It felt like I had been A/B tested for a
| new change which then got pulled back and made more
| subtle. But it is still a bad change!
|
| I don't know what they're optimizing for but it certainly
| isn't my enjoyment.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| I don't watch interesting videos anymore.
|
| Too interesting, too holy shit wow can't believe that,
| wow. Like sometimes an EE thing yes, then it makes sense,
| basically a guy talking about an oscilloscope or
| television then it's part of the show to use a television
| to talk about it. And only when they link to it
| externally.
|
| But interesting for its own sake? Rather talk to the men
| on the street, those guys are interesting, have great
| stories.
| WASDx wrote:
| You're the exception. They naturally do A/B testing and are
| data-driven to optimize for said objectives.
| doliveira wrote:
| Yeah, I know, line goes up when taking the population
| average. Must even point in the direction of ads watchers
| and clickers. Taking into account the shitty videos this
| cost function promotes, I honestly get a little proud of
| this algorithm not working for me.
|
| Would be nice for us to have a little more control and
| transparency over where the AI is taking us, though,
| specially for us YouTube Premium payers.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| I'm sure if YouTube PMs could they would mail you cocaine
| if it made you watch enough ads.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > The goals of the advertising business model do not always
| correspond to providing quality search to users.
|
| -Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale
| Hypertextual Web Search Engine
| causi wrote:
| Don't forget how you get five or six results from your search
| term before it starts listing random videos like it has ADHD.
| maest wrote:
| I'm sure the YT PMs have proof that this improves engagement.
|
| On a similar note, I've started noticing the third video in
| the "related videos" section on the right-hand sidebar is
| usually a new video with _extremely_ clickbait and
| inflammatory titles - sometimes with little connection to the
| topics I usually watch.
|
| They're extremely distracting so I've set up a uBlock filter
| for these: `www.youtube.com##ytd-compact-video-renderer.ytd-
| item-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(3)`
|
| This doesn't work 100% of the time, but it's good enough. (in
| particular, it fails if what I'm watching is a trailer video
| which makes the 2nd recommendation in the sidebar be a movie
| recommendation which doesn't fit this rule; as a result it
| blocks the 4th entry in the list, but oh well)
| ipaddr wrote:
| Until this changes to the 4th or 2nd
| ithinkso wrote:
| > I'm sure the YT PMs have proof that this improves
| engagement.
|
| I sometimes wonder if the opposite is true - that the PMs
| can convince the upper managment that users are staying on
| the website longer with all those stupid as fuck shit
| changes, but in reality they are there longer because it's
| increasingly more difficult to find anything you are
| looking for
|
| Sort of 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a
| good measure'
| MWil wrote:
| Reminds me of that scene from The Office (US) where Phyllis
| is calling 411 to inquire about anti-gravity machines and
| they ask if she'll settle for...
|
| well just watch...
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG1NeA3WoKc
| winternett wrote:
| YouTube's KPIs for promoting videos are totally off base in my
| opinion. They use click through rates and watch time as key
| indicators, which can easily be manipulated by bots, which is
| pretty obvious now as rampant on the platform with popular
| videos showing millions and billions of views, while the
| majority of posts (from small creators only get 100 or less
| views over years on the platform.
|
| On YouTube, you get thrown in a trash bin unless you're able to
| pay or generate traffic from popularity elsewhere.
|
| YT also puts too much emphasis on post titles now, many posters
| outright clone titles, which in turn botches search results
| massively. It was a terrible decision YT made to deprioritize
| taxonomy (hash tags) years ago in order to reduce moderation
| staff-- Of which, if taxonomy actually worked, feedback could
| better identify inaccurate and mis-leading content when
| compared to thumbs down rates... The options for video result
| sorting have been terribly limited and almost useless as well
| for ages now.
|
| A big conflict of interest is that YouTube sells and promotes
| ad-based content boosting to creators, which contradicting-ly
| makes them more geared towards promoting content that falls
| under this (paid promotional) category first. It also drives
| YouTube to lower organic reach for users to drive them towards
| paying for promotion more year over year... That also
| encourages the platform to subvert organically good/upvoted
| content. YT can't logically sell the idea that organic growth
| is a possibility any more citing the underlying fact that they
| feature paid promotion without labeling every promoted item of
| that content as such, it's shocking how they get away with this
| contradiction of authenticity regularly.
|
| The older engagement methods were far better for YouTube's
| content quality and authenticity. Now too many users are driven
| to post repetitive and dragged out videos, with titles based on
| trends, with decreasing originality and substance.
|
| The current YouTube/TikTok success model is training everyone
| to conform to a single theme and format, encouraging idea,
| topic, and content cloning, and into repeating and simply
| reacting to what popular channels do.
|
| YouTube content will all only continue to get worse and more
| monotonous if the same ideals on paid promotion continue, and
| creator success/profit will continue to shrink. (Just my
| opinion of course).
| jsemrau wrote:
| > (from small creators only get 100 or less views over years
| on the platform.
|
| finclout is trying to address this by providing a more
| effective means of monetization for smaller creators in the
| financial services space. There are great insights coming
| from this group by they are getting drowned out by the
| algorithm of Youtube (as you correctly stated)
| [deleted]
| samb1729 wrote:
| Please disclose the fact that finclout is a product you are
| invested in when advertising it on here.
| jsemrau wrote:
| The irony is that this is exactly the problem of current
| social media. Everyone can comment on everything in any
| way they like and there is no way to validate their
| affiliations, intentions, or sponsorships on scale.
| hawski wrote:
| At the same time when I want to find a song it often is enough
| to somewhat be phonetically in the realms of song's text or
| mention a characteristic object from the video clip if I saw it
| and it will often be the first result.
| toxik wrote:
| Is it possible to build a third party YouTube search by scraping
| a) YouTube and b) the user's watch history?
|
| To me it seems like there's some mid-to-low hanging fruit there.
| YT's recommender fails to understand when a video is part of a
| series so often I almost have to think it's intentional. Also
| recommending videos I've already watched in my homepage feed?
| What?
|
| What bugs me the most is that it wasn't always this bad. Somebody
| changed it a couple of years ago.
| mbirth wrote:
| Invidious was such project, IIRC.
| mtoner23 wrote:
| Certaily gotta be against youtube's TOS and it'll get shut down
| [deleted]
| post_break wrote:
| All I want is to be able to remove channels from my search,
| similar to removing pinterest from Google search.
| causi wrote:
| Being able to subscribe to specific playlists and keep specific
| playlists from your subscriptions would be wondrous. There's a
| ton of channels I'd like to subscribe to but they just pollute
| my Subscriptions page too much.
| wsostt wrote:
| You can add a playlist to your library and it will show up in
| the Playlists section. Navigate to the playlist and look for
| an icon with throw horizontal lines and a check mark.
| timbit42 wrote:
| BlockTube removes videos based on words in titles and channel
| names: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/blocktube/
| normhill wrote:
| I just checked this works -"channel name" (it only works if the
| channel name is in quotes)
| post_break wrote:
| I'll have to try it, I need it on the mobile app.
| savanaly wrote:
| It's not directly available in search but from the home page
| you can click the triple dot menu and click Don't recommend
| channel.
| post_break wrote:
| That doesn't remove a channel from search unfortunately.
| davisoneee wrote:
| For firefox users:
|
| Extension [1] gives a little 'X' beside the channel name in
| home and search, that can be used to completely remove that
| channel from all future searches.
|
| Similarly, remove a bunch of random distracting crap[2] such as
| 'related results'.
|
| [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-
| clean...
|
| [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-
| recom...
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| jsemrau wrote:
| That's reallyhelpful. I am building youtube integration right now
| and noticed how the search results are really weird.
| xnx wrote:
| In most cases, I'll take YouTube's default ranking, which might
| incorporate captioned text, comments, and other signals. Good to
| have this search operator as an option for specific uses.
| firebaze wrote:
| Brave search. Search for brave search, and you're back to when
| google was good.
|
| https://search.brave.com/
|
| (Not affiliated with brave at all, just really impressed by their
| search engine)
| Llamamoe wrote:
| This is brilliant. I can't believe I haven't thought of it.
|
| I also recommend Distraction Free YouTube for blocking
| recommendations and (optionally) comments.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| This is great.
|
| Lately I've been learning to play traditional Irish music. Often
| I'll want to hear as many versions of a tune as I can; don't care
| if it's studio musicians, a session at a bar, or a few mates in
| their kitchen, as long as it includes the specified tune.
|
| What will often happen if I search, for example, "Monaghan Jig,"
| is that I'll get a few results from famous albums and
| professional YouTube content creators, then a bunch of other
| jigs, The Hag At The Churn, Lark in The Morning etc. and they'll
| drown out videos with the actual jig I want.
|
| After that I have to experiment with variations like, "Monaghan
| Jig concertina," "Monaghan Jig pub session" etc to find the other
| videos YouTube's search had dismissed for me that indeed included
| "Monaghan Jig" in both the title and the content.
|
| With this operator I can hopefully save myself a lot of guesswork
| and frustration.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I'm just glad that there's still an operator that isn't just
| ignored.
|
| I half suspect that this is a mistake and youtube will correct
| it quickly once word spreads.
| withinboredom wrote:
| From watching with closed captions turned on. I can guess why
| their search is so terrible. Loud noises turns into closed
| captions (the ones generated by them) which probably gets
| indexed.
| ok123456 wrote:
| use yandex to search for youtube videos.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Similar here. I often use Google itself to search for YouTube
| videos since the results aren't as immediately filled with
| random nonsense as with YouTube's own search
| throwawaygog6 wrote:
| While we are here, is there a service that provides me with list
| of newly uploaded youtube videos? In my mother tongue (south
| indian language), I have many interesting channels but youtube
| does not surface them by default. I just want to go through the
| list and write an algorithm to filter them out based on
| mypreferences.
|
| Is there somebody who scrapes them youtube and sells the data
| kmfrk wrote:
| You can still use
| https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={CHANNEL...
| to pull up the RSS feed for a channel.
| ttymck wrote:
| Does the subscribe feature do what you are looking for?
| throwawaygog6 wrote:
| Subscribe does not help me in discovering new channels on
| topics I want.
| gxqoz wrote:
| I use NewPipe on Android and it has an option to show a
| chronological list of all new videos from all channels I'm
| subscribed to.
| upupandup wrote:
| what i would appreciate is if i could not see videos ive seen
| before twice.
|
| also the ability to search videos that is under a specific view
| count or likes that has bee uploaded between specific date
| ranges.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| If I had a magic wand, I'd create a non-profit, funded by the
| world's governments, to host the bulk of the world's videos.
| Wojcicki's Youtube doesn't care if when a user browses the site,
| it's like wading through a sea of garbage, as long as the user
| browses for as many hours as possible.
| BuyMyBitcoins wrote:
| Browsing YouTube without an AdBlocker and cosmetic filters that
| hide emblems and badges on the video player is truly shocking.
| I really sense the goal of YouTube isn't to get you to watch
| something, it's to get you to watch _something else_ - at all
| times.
|
| I've seen it recommend related videos as soon as the video
| starts playing. It will recommend videos as soon as you click
| pause. There will be little interstitial recommendation
| overlays as it plays. How desperate must product managers at
| YouTube be to push this so strongly?
|
| Thankfully I crafted some filters to hide all of this, but it's
| so user hostile that I feel bad for anyone that doesn't know
| how to get rid of all this noise.
| ctoth wrote:
| Didn't recognize the name, Googled her (CEO of YouTube), today
| is her birthday. Funny.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| Up until 2018, I used to joke that "Youtube is CEO-less."
| There were articles bemoaning Youtube's toxicity, but they
| never contained the word 'Wojcicki'.
|
| These days, the press sometimes - though still not often -
| mentions her name.
| clircle wrote:
| All search engines are bad now because search engines have turned
| into recommendation engines in the past 5-10 years.
| MrBlueIncognito wrote:
| Sometimes these tangentially-related search results help people
| discover new things they would've otherwise missed out on. I
| believe striking a balance between recommendations and to-the-
| point results is necessary.
| rhacker wrote:
| I did a youtube search for:
|
| attaching a prehung door
|
| and
|
| intitle: attaching a prehung door
|
| and the results are identical (for me at least). The results are
| also extremely relevant and concise in showing me how to install
| a prehung door. I am not really sure what people mean. Are people
| asking youtube to find videos that don't exist? like "how to make
| tritan plastic"
| mbirth wrote:
| If it works anything like with the plain Google search, the
| modifier only applies to text directly following the colon.
|
| E.g.: intitle:door
|
| will find all videos with "door" in their title.
| intitle:"prehung door"
|
| will find all videos where these two words in exactly that
| order are mentioned in the title.
|
| So to have it search for all words in the title, you'd have to
| do a search for: intitle:attaching intitle:a
| intitle:prehung intitle:door
| sndean wrote:
| I just did "tour de france 2022 stage 4" and "intitle: tour de
| france 2022 stage 4". For me the results are close but notably
| the first several results went from an average video length of
| ~4 minutes to ~40 minutes, including someone's two-hour-long
| stream.
|
| Maybe it really depends on what you're searching for. But I
| also rarely see many irrelevant results, including for this
| search.
| lajosbacs wrote:
| How I make youtube bearable:
|
| - subscribe through RSS only
|
| - block all 'related videos' boxes with the picker tool from
| ublock
| jacooper wrote:
| Or just use Newpipe/Piped :).
| mbirth wrote:
| Or FreeTube
| mgdlbp wrote:
| Reminds me of this comment hinting at a search technique that the
| user doesn't want to say publicly lest YouTube remove it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630286
|
| ( _What is it?? :P_ )
| jbay808 wrote:
| While we're here, does YouTube search support date range
| specifiers? I sometimes want to find a video I remember being
| published in, say, 2014, but the title might be hard to search
| for or get buried under similar names. YouTube's UI filters only
| let me limit to some hard-coded ranges, all of which prioritize
| recent videos.
| groovybits wrote:
| I found this site that has operators you can type in the search
| bar:
|
| https://seosly.com/youtube-search-operators/
|
| Date operators: before:[date]
| after:[date] [search term], today [search
| term], last hour [search term], this month
| [search term], this year
|
| I tried the search: tesla, before:2019-01-02,
| after:2019-01-01
|
| And it appeared to work like you'd expect.
|
| Edit: I'm not sure how intuitive the operators are. Ex:
| Combining them doesn't seem to give the expected results.
| abraae wrote:
| It's so weird to me how hard it is to find this sort of
| reference information.
|
| I experienced the same thing when looking for a definitive
| list of voice commands for Android auto.
|
| In the old days we carried around pocket sized cards with the
| full set of all possible instructions/ parameters.
|
| These days you have to search on Google, and then look at
| whichever ad-ridden hellhole has played the SEO game most
| effectively. That might have the answers, or it might be
| stale since it was originally copied and pasted from some
| other site long ago.
|
| Why doesn't YouTube provide this information themselves?
| sergers wrote:
| believe its your use of commas,
|
| need to use plus "+"
|
| tesla, before:2019-01-02 + after:2019-01-01
|
| i came across another site that had a few more,
| https://granwehr.com/blog/youtube-search-
| operators#15-advanc...
| mgdlbp wrote:
| The date range filter of your search engine of choice, combined
| with 'site:youtube.com'. You also get the other behaviours of
| that search engine, though Google probably has the most
| complete index in this case.
|
| I've also tried the 'sort by oldest' programmed Google search
| that was posted here,[1] but its index seems to be missing many
| pages--youtube videos with few views in particular--compared to
| general Google.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31333436
| BLO716 wrote:
| Oh my, two posts where Google Dorking and #OSINT have found their
| way into posts. :) Love it!!! DefCon funzies abound on HN today.
|
| https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/cyber-security-tutoria...
|
| Search Engine - "Google Dorking" like inurl: intitle: intext:
| etc.
|
| Also, google dorking has its "darkweb" side in forensics too.
| Enjoy.
|
| https://www.exploit-db.com/
| brezelgoring wrote:
| I found in the <"indexof:" include/> clue that our Social
| Sciences faculty is wide open, thanks!
| mxmilkiib wrote:
| Sort by upload date also cuts out semi-related results
| tmaly wrote:
| I would be curious to know what other advance search type
| keywords work in YouTube
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(page generated 2022-07-05 23:00 UTC)