[rhacker]

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"

[Gigachad]

HN will often claim something is unusable and not what it used to be when the general public is quite happy with it and its working very well. I think it's more a bias against the wider product or company. HN users do not like YouTube and Google in general so any minor issue gets overblown while they would be quite happy to compile a new kernel to get PeerTube running.

[throwntoday]

It's not a conspiracy that Google/Youtube search have degraded to near unusable for niche searches. All I can say is that you're probably not searching for anything too specific.

[Gigachad]

I have searched for specific things a lot. Usually I just search what I remember being in the video rather than what I thought the title was. The right video comes up even when the words I search did not show up in the title or description. Google's ability to search is only just short of being magic.

Meanwhile, the products which HN promotes regularly like Mastodon and PeerTube fail to find things with directly searching the title text because P2P search is completely non functional.

[throwntoday]

I'll give you an example. I was recently searching for an old blog post I read about a guy who installed fiber at his home. No amount of specific or vague search terms on google would yield anything but endless pages of results that were either blogspam or ISP product pages for fiber internet. Surely google doesn't think an ISP in Australia offering fiber is relevant enough to an SF resident that it should be on the second page of results.

Results get exponentially worse the more pages in you go. By page 3 the only results are ISP's. Basically if it isn't on page 1, it's just padding almost totally unrelated to what you were looking for.

[rhacker]

Is it possible they took down the blog or blog post? That happens and no amount of google wishing brings that back.

[saagarjha]

People typically compare products with previous iterations of themselves.

[davidatbu]

Do you have any data to back up the claim that Youtube search has deteriorated a lot? (The phrase "it's no conspiracy" implies to me that it's some obvious, or widely-agreed-upon, truth).

Anecdotally, I absolutely love youtube search.

[mbirth]

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

[mgdlbp]

Or use,

  allintitle: attaching a prehung door

But it seems that allintitle can only be used at the beginning of a query, so there's no way to combine it with non-title keywords.

Engines supporting parentheses like Reddit's or Elasticsearch prevail here:

  title:(attaching a prehung door)

But for some reason that doesn't work in Wikipedia's search, even though CirrusSearch is based on Elasticsearch.

[sndean]

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.