[eqdw]

I don't know what OP's suggested solution is, but if I had my way, I'd just eliminate recommendations entirely, in favour of perhaps some kind of category- or tag-based search (eg "give me more cute puppy videos"). Especially since so many people seem to have so many problems with recommendations, it's clearly not bringing value to life, so just get rid of it.

Of course Google won't, because it would dramatically reduce watch time and their advertisers wouldn't like that. But a man can dream

[cheald]

> in favour of perhaps some kind of category- or tag-based search

Because the people looking for visibility on their conspiracy video would never tag their video with high-visibility keywords like "cute" and "puppies"!

Dumb metadata-based search and content recommendation is not the way forward. Google's original contribution to the web was pulling us out of that tarpit - SEO prior to PageRank was a wreck.