Yep, I confirm that is my experience as well. Google is starting to inch towards the television industry. In all honesty Im not watching any TV these days but i imagine its some advertising and snippets of content. Youtube without membership or ad blockers is just like that if not worse. From how if started to what is has become it’s a long way…
Yup. I now pretty much use YouTube search only to call up a video where I have the YT ID. Everything else is a waste of time, and I just use DDG search if I want to find something without the ID in hand.
How management thinks it is a good idea to make their products useless by letting a bunch of self-aggrandizing "analysts" or marketers or whatever attempt to manipulate their customers/viewers is beyond me. The fact that they are all paid to fork it up so badly is just mindboggling.
Myspace was the place to be until one day it wasn’t. YouTube is a behemoth but it too could fall one day. For now the amount of information it has is just too valuable but it is becoming less enjoyable to use the site all the time. On iOS I don’t have an Adblock and am forced to watch countless ads and then When I watch the ad the video fails to load. So I refresh and sometimes that works sometimes I need to do it several times before the video will play. It is a shame they have gone so downhill over the years for us old enough to remember the beginnings.
As a regular user, my expectation is that the very first results from a search would be from matching the title string (possibly after trying to match the unique video id seen in the url), only afterwards would results from keyword matching and other such metadata show up.
Maybe I'm out of touch but I don't think this is an unreasonable expectation.
It's not unreasonable, and it's exactly how it used to work until Google started messing around with inserting ads into every aspect of the site (they very much want you to you click on the ad-laden videos you were NOT looking for). They changed the default and relegated it to be a search modifier.