[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.