[Timucin]

I've recently moved away from Google to DuckDuckGo, so didn't notice that but I noticed something similar on YouTube.

For some reason, it keeps recommending the videos I already watched, the ones in my save for later and the most annoying one: the ones from the channels I marked as not interested.

My recommendations also getting less and less relevant.

They definitely changed something and broke a perfectly working system.

[NeedMoreTea]

It's frustrating in its simplicity. I don't need 5 more versions of the same track. They're showing far fewer of the same genre and era but a lot more conspiracy theory garbage that I will never, ever intentionally click, yet their algo has never noticed the total lack of clicks on those "Proof of alien life", "brexit is great" or "lizards are running the show really" videos.

"recommended for you", yeah right. How do they arrive here from say 1 from CGP Grey, 2 from ACDC and 1 from Iron Maiden?

Last.fm used to have my music taste well nailed and followed up with a lot of unknown stuff that I ended up loving and buying. YT had more data for longer yet has no clue at all. Now I just search and play direct from DDG.

YT never worked that well for me, but now it's rarely worth even checking the other videos column.

[palerdot]

Youtube search quality is horribly bad in recent weeks. I'm being suggested videos that are minimum 2 years older continously in the home page. There are more recent videos from the same channels, but all I see is 2-3 year old video suggestions as if my phone/computer clock is reset to a date few years back. I'm not even sure if they are running some kind of experiment or is it a bug.

[buboard]

They should give more tools to creators to organize their content. The default channel video listings is a mess with no rhyme or reason.

[nihil75]

Second.YouTube keeps showing me the same (promoted?) videos on the right-hand bar, so I keep navigating back to the home page to get half-decent recommendations.

[brazzledazzle]

I’ve noticed that as well. Also noticed that sometimes I’ll watch a video and if I watch it again the timestamp it resumes at is somewhere near the beginning liked I’d only watched a few seconds. Perhaps a problem with the system that keeps track of how much you’ve watched or not is breaking other things.

[pjc50]

Searching for stuff you've already seen is reasonable. But reccomendation really needs to have a simple partition into two categories: watched and not watched. Both are valid but they are very different use cases.

Also they need to stop reccomending flat earth, anti-vax and other toxic nonsense without prompting.

[hexmiles]

Also they need to stop reccomending flat earth, anti-vax and other toxic nonsense without prompting.

There are trying to at least that: https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/01/continuing-our-work-t...

also this post (and the related discussion) provide some additional context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19128259

[pure-awesome]

Is DuckDuckGo good now? When I first tried it out a couple of years back, I found it didn't give me enough (relevant) results on my searches, so I stayed with Google.

I assume it must have improved in that time; maybe I should try it again.

[alpaca128]

My impression is that DDG requires a slightly different choice of keywords. But you'll get used to it and in my experience it currently delivers better results than Google.

When I started using DuckDuckGo I often switched to Google for certain queries, now I do that very rarely because Google's results get more disappointing every year.

[tropo]

It seems dramatically better. I think the reality is that this is only relative to Google today, not Google long ago. Lots of us have been like the mythical frog in the slowly-heated pot, failing to notice that Google is getting worse. For business reasons, or because executives have an agenda, Google now refuses to prioritize what users want.

So yes, you should try it again.

[pindab0ter]

As pointed out by the other commenters you need a slightly different approach to search terms since they don't build a profile of what is and isn't relevant to you.

That said, it's definitely a lot better than a few years ago. I'm the same in having tried it back then and I couldn't get many useful results. I've been using it for half a year again now and only occasionally do I use the "!g"-bang to revert to a Google search.

[DrAwdeOccarim]

It's OK. It works well for me for common things that are easy to find. Restaurants, wiki entries, etc. But for example a new paper published today in Nature? Even searching for the whole title in quotes with DDG will not return it. Gotta go to Google for that.

[aembleton]

DDG index is not as fresh as Google's. That and local, location specific searches are what I use Google for these days.

[Timucin]

It requires a bit time to get used to it but not more than couple of days I think. The interface is quite similar to what google provides and I quite liked seeing the answer I am looking for as a part of the search.

[crypticlizard]

it's pretty good, when it's not i put a g! before the query

[SquareWheel]

It seems likely that people would search for videos they've previously watched. Must consider that these products are made for "normies", not power users.

[zython]

I had a similar experience with youtube lately: I was looking for a song that I knew the tune and a related artist and for the love of god could not find it with the current youtube recommendations. Most of the videos I'd get recommended when searching related songs, were not even music-related. So I went to archive.org and within a couple of results found what I was looking for.

Youtube's recommendation has really changed for the worse.

[saiya-jin]

its even worse with youtube - if I leave the TV, it will continue playing videos youtube considers somehow related to original one. But it often forgets what it already played in a row, so sometimes plays the same video multiple times. Like 1 2 3 4 2 5 1 6 5 3 etc.

[kirb]

A few months ago I found that if I played music on YouTube and let it go on autoplay, it would eventually play a specific song. It’ll play something else next as per usual, but the Up Next for this video would almost always be that same specific song. I can’t fathom how this worked so well for years and is now totally broken. Or how the algorithm chokes as soon as it reaches that one specific video.

[buboard]

most frustrating when you re watching a series of lectures and it recommends the previous one , or breaks the series