It’s so bad. I keep searching topics on YouTube and getting 3-4 results before YouTube starts recommending videos based on past searches or past watched videos. Like, excuse me YouTube, what the fuck? You search what I tell you to search.

I just love how YouTube has a “show unwatched” button in its search that usually shows me videos I have watched multiple times.

Dunno about Google but Youtube seems to be making some things harder on purpose, like seeing the date of a video or showing search results in chronological order.

Yup. I had this exact thought YESTERDAY, when I did a search for the name of a GitHub project I needed to read up on (I forget which project), with a couple keywords, and the GitHub page wasn’t even IN the top results. Later, I was doing a search for a quoted phrase, which of course is supposed to guarantee that the phrase appears, verbatim, in the results, and found that NONE of the results contained that phrase.

And no, I wasn’t looking at the AI results, I’ve got those removed with a plugin.

Both have been prioritising “engagement” over “results” because it allows them to advertise to you more.

In case you didn’t realise, if the product is free, you’re the product and both have been doing an amazing job out of extracting value from your eyeballs.

Unsurprisingly, they’re both owned by the same company.

It’s all monetization directed, no matter what. Boolean search is gone.

What bugs me — and Apple Music is guilty of this too — is when I search for an indie or eastern song and it only shows popular results from the west.

Marvis Pro, a feature rich front end for Apple Music, knows my favourite musicians or bands are ONE OK ROCK, Enya, and Nightwish. I don’t want American Top 40 trash. But it still pushes that stuff.

It also feels like some pages in top results didn’t even exist before I made the search. They are filled with generic babble about the subject without ever going to details or conclusions. Dribble that no human would ever write

Search has been becoming smarter for years (decades?) by now.

The problem is that search has been made to work with the “you know what I mean” factor… fixing spelling mistakes, considering different tenses or forms of words, including related words…

Search became more friendly to the average non-technical user, but it became harder for users who know/knew how to search for exactly what they want.

Other factors include…

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) where websites try to appear for as many searches as possible, occasionally regardless of relevance
• Monetization of search, where people with SEO and a lot of money pay to be included in as many “relevant” searches as possible
• AI incorporated into search by trying to find additional relevant pages
• Search engines being reluctant to return zero (or few) results and padding the results with other things you “might be interested in”
• Also, search trying to use what you “might be interested in” based on what they know about you/your account/your IP address/your location based on your IP range.

Use duckduckgo and turn off ai results. Problem solved.

I’m annoyed that YT got rid of the search by newest first option. At least Rumble has it still

Yes. It’s becoming shittier everyday.

Yes

I’ve been using Ecosia since Google turned to absolute dogshit because of SEO and sponsored links. Now I don’t even use search engines anymore, I just ask an LLM immediately and tell it to link its sources so I can verify for myself