It's a bigger paradigm shift in the tech industry. Search is one of the remaining ideas that empower users, because it does what users tell it to do. In the new paradigm users have no agency, instead the platform builds persona profiles and tells users what they should do. It's very similar to how farms manage cattle for profit.

Besides, what is digm in paradigm?

I’m just guessing, but I think “digm” is Greek for “No, we won’t allow you to view a channel’s videos sorted from oldest to newest. What a preposterous idea!”

Am I close?

Digm is word with complex meaning, and appears in many languages, including Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. It expresses an idea. But I believe that those who are curious should do this research themselves.

Ill go search for it on Youtube.

I also notice the shift you are mentioning.

But I'm still a bit hesitant about its causes. Wether degraded search is an intentional feature or not, I think there is another and simpler explanation to consider when we discuss this topic: cost and skill.

Google seems to be an exception in that field as it has, in my opinion, clearly demonstrated an ability to implement a functioning search. Consequently, our only option as users is to assume that a dysfunction in a Google product's search function can only be intentional and triggered by hidden motives (e.g., restricting users liberty to decide what should never or absolutely be in the results).

A second factor I like to take into consideration is the iPhone user effect, or what I like to call the "iTard effect". The itard effect is the tendency by tech companies to design and aim their user interfaces specifically to satisfy their least tech savvy users while alienating its more technical customers in the process. A good example of these are search engines that automatically canonicalize what you type and either won't allow you to run a search exactly as you specify it but will keep altering your query terms because "you probably needed help writing this query".

There is also a third option, that affects both larger tech tycoons and other companies: they cannot search their content accurately.

This could be caused by poor architecture decisions (I think we are still years ahead from assessing the real damage caused by over-containerization/micro-architecturization across the world) but also by costs: the more you delegate your IT operations to third parties (e.g., cloud, pass, saas, etc.) the more you become vulnerable to abusive costs of search.

I totally agree with you, search simply doesn't work in most of the websites I regularly visit (even search engines). But I think there are only less than a dozen companies that would intentionally and effectively alter search results to impose their own agenda onto the user. Unfortunately, these companies are precisely the ones that interact with the vast majority of human beings on the globe on a daily basis :)

"Paradigm" in Greek is "παράδειγμα", which is a combined word for "παρα" + "δείκνυμι".

It more or less means "for example", but "παρα" has multiple meanings, depending how you use it as part of a possible combination, but in this case I would say it means "similarity", whereas "δείκνυμι" means "to point out".

My English is not even mediocre to be able to explain it to you in great detail I'm afraid; my apologies -_-

You can try to avoid irrelevant search results by using advanced search filters like "intitle:" or "-" to exclude specific words.

I made a simple YouTube search form with search filters that work well on YouTube: https://playlists.at/youtube/search/

Interesting; my experience has differed: I noticed since late 2022 (last year) Youtube Search was essentially ignoring my exact queries, giving only the first two or so result matching the query - the rest of the results aren't even marginally related.

Worse--this behavior continues, and has gotten so bad that today searching is all but useless to me.

FYI- Your portal gave me good laugh on how it finds 'exact' Titles: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+intitle%3Afugi...

It works!

Exactly! It's so infuriating to search for a song cover and instead of being able to discover indie musician covers or rare live recordings, I get the studio version + 2 results, then I get redirected to 'related' songs.

I tried it with:

Jeep "cj7 cylinder head"

and got videos about soft tops.

Editing the search term to:

jeep "cj7" "cylinder head"

got me actual results

Is it just me or YT also has this curious habit of pushing and promoting electoral politics video content more and more despite knowing full well that you don't watch such content?

I haven't seen any politics in my feed. The content it shows me is fairly related to what I watch. I have used "Not interested" and "Don't recommend channel" fairly often, so that probably has helped.

In the past I aggressively made use of “Don’t recommend this” and “Not interested” options, along with deleting accidental clicks from my history. I actually haven’t had to do that in a long time though and I’m not seeing any political videos at all.

If you’re not doing anything to curate your recommendations, maybe give it a shot.

It’s not just you but it is you. :)

You’ve engaged with it so they keep throwing it at you. My kid broke my YouTube when he was little watching awful kid videos. You need to find something high value to reset or break the profile. Stuff like crypto and gold coins are easy to spot and skip and high value. So if you leave a gold coin playlist running, you won’t see political ads.

Over time, the gold stuff will go away.

I don't know if it's just you, but it hasn't been recommending that stuff to me (thank goodness).

I've never been recommended those kind of videos, but the only political things I watch on YouTube are live streams of the debates, inaugurations, and the state of the union.

not really but I get flooded with sports videos. "Not interested" and "Don't recommend channel" tend to reinforce this behavior.

I’m being spammed with ads, shorts, and videos from a single right-wing ultra-Catholic party. It’s quite annoying.

Thank you for taking one for the team and soaking up their ad spend ;)

`You searched for “car review”, but you’ve watched a lot of super Mario videos lately. How about you watch more of those instead of what you searched for?’

Thanks google.

Numbers apparently points to people being so distracted on the internet they forget what they where doing and instead of helping, google just leans into it.

A couple of my goto options are DuckDuckGo's video search or using the 'site:youtube.com' search operator trick for Google Search. YouTube's search and recommendations are largely useless now. YT just seems to endlessly shovel clickbait.

I luv-luv-luv userscript:

Block Youtube Users

> Hide videos of blacklisted users/channels and comments

https://greasyfork.org/scripts/11057

It's like GHHbD but from within Youtube.

Invidious (alt. Frontend), NewPipe (android), FreeTube (PC). I use those since long ago. There's LibRedirect web extension for your web browser to find good invidious instances too. Cheers!

If you go to Filter > Video, it gives you a more traditional search.

Additionally, YouTube can be thought of as the second most used search engine. Which in return means that the built-in search is now up against Google, Bing and whatever else - and most other engines can be restricted to just search YouTube using the site: operator.

the majority of my search results now is just "things I like", that are in absolutely no way related to the content I'm looking for, interspersed with occasional video related to what I'm actually after.

For example, I looked for a car review because I'm buying a new car, and 80% of the search results are guitar related content, because I play guitar and that's the vast majority of the content I normally watch.

They seem to have completely missed the point of SEARCH. It's meant to be a tool for creating targeted results. If I just wanted random content to pass my time, the landing page already does that.

I just tried this out because it sounds believable. I watch _a lot_ of youtube. and it's content is pretty focused. I searched, "ikea review" and it showed me exclusively ikea reviews.

what I have noticed now and in the past is that if you search something that does not have high matches, it just throws at you unrelated garbage that you normally watch.

Google search is the answer! It works way better than YouTube search. There's an option you can click that gives you only video results.

I am sure SHORTS you can find SHORTS some interesting SHORTS ikea furniture You just have to believe SHORTS

Try this github repo: https://github.com/tycrek/degoogle, there is a Youtube section there.

I just search on Google with site:YouTube.com

Havou tried pipe-viewer or piped/invidious?