[wincy]

For April Fools Sega released an (actual, real) “Sanic the Hedgeheg” t-shirt and I wanted to see if there was anything about it on YouTube. YouTube assumed I meant “sonic” and it was impossible to correct it and say “no I’m actually searching for this dumb meme”. It just assumes everyone who uses YouTube is really dumb I guess. (I bought the shirt by the way and am excited to get it lol)

[QuantumNomad_]

I was curious after reading your comment and searched for sanic meme tshirt in the YouTube app. One result looked highly relevant, posted 4 days ago. It was a short, not a normal video mind you. Titled Official “Sanic” merchandise and having a picture of sanic and some dude’s face. Most of the rest of the results were from different dates, several ranging to years ago. But a lot of those other ones seemed to be about meme sanic as well at least.

I didn’t click on any of them to verify, lest YouTube decides that it should replace my whole YouTube home page with sonic fandom and sanic memes :P

[AlBugdy]

> It was a short, not a normal video mind you.

If anyone doesn't know, you can change shorts/<ID> with watch?v=<ID> in the URL and it gives you the same UI as for other videos, including the controls (the time line). Not sure why YouTube doesn't have controls for shorts. I've seen some Facebook videos not having controls, either, when I've been sent a link. I imagine it's the same for Instagram and TikTok.

[john01dav]

I just put this into YouTube search and got results that contraindicate your claim¹:

> "sanic" the hedgehog

The quotes seem to shut down autocorrect

1: there's nothing that I see about the T-shirt, but the first result is titled "Sanic DA hedgeh0g". I will not be looking at what this video is. Several other results also include the word "sanic" in relation to the hedgehog.

[QuantumNomad_]

Did you mean to respond to one of the sibling comments that are talking about autocorrect? I don’t understand what would be contradictory between what I said and what you said.

[byte_0]

This is exactly the type of criteria that WhatsApp search struggles with. It basically assumes the user does not know how to type.

[kotaKat]

Apparently To Catch a Predator ("TCAP") makes YouTube think I've got a Spanish eating disorder and shoves a full screen "you're not alone" screen at you to call some eating disorder helpline.

[msephton]

Just put the term in quotes "sanic the hedgeheg" ignore the suggestions and press enter to see the real results.

[thfuran]

Google no longer cares much about quotes. Sometimes it’ll take them seriously and sometimes not.

[ssl-3]

Indeed.

Just last night, I wanted to find some antonyms of a word. So I did what I've done for decades and simply Googled that.

It insisted that I meant synonym, not antonym. Let that sink in for a moment.

Irrevocably substituting the antonym of antonym is the most balls-up, backwards, paradoxical "I'm from Google, and I'm here to help!" thing I can imagine happening to one word.

The quotes did nothing. The search results were all for synonyms, with the word synonym bolded in each excerpt.

---

(Hey, Google: It's fine to present to the user a suggestion, or a correction. I can even work with a system that assumes a correction is good and uses it on the first pass -- I might not like the extra step, but I'll get over it. Sometimes, that's actually useful.

But when your systems present a line that asks "Did you mean 'synonym'?" and then offers no option for the user to -- you know -- actually answer that question and reject the correction, then that's not good.

In fact, some descriptors that come to mind before "not good" in this context are "callous," "insulting," "recalcitrant," and "sadistic.")

[eMPee584]

There's another more hidden tool avail: right of the search type bar (images/news/books) there is a "search tools" menu where you can open "all results" and switch it to "verbatim". Often times a good way to see another defunct relict of old, quality google: the empty-result-troll that would once upon a time pull out his fishing rod on click..

[Gander5739]

A tangent, but this is the second time in two days I've seen the word spelled "often times" instead of "oftentimes". Is this some variant spelling I don't know of? I see it more than "oftentimes" now, which I was hitherto convinced was the only correct spelling.

[mister_mort]

I've never seen it spelled as "oftentimes".

[ssl-3]

Great. Is there a way to make that the default?

I (usually!) want to find documents that include the words that I'm searching for, not an endless stream of links that some particularly-useless bot thinks I might want instead.

(And when that search returns no results, then that is also a useful data point for me.)

[lelandfe]

For instance, searching the quoted (random phrase) "pants butler" produces first page results like:

"pants,” Butler" and "pants...Butler" and "Pants - Butler's"

Second page loses it entirely, with results like "BUTLER SVC Green Back Country Cargo Pants" and another that seemingly lacks "butler" anywhere on the page.

[iamnothere]

I have also noticed this. Many other search engines have started doing it too.

If I had to guess, they are probably deferring to autocorrect if a quoted search doesn’t appear often enough to be notable and the distance to existing common tokens is small. This really sucks, because it means that you can’t search for uncommon things that are named similarly to common terms. Once upon a time it wasn’t like this.

A similar problem comes up if you want to clarify a common search with an uncommon term, like (made up example here) “German castle Tokyo”. Once upon a time you could quote the uncommon term or prefix it with a plus to force a narrowing of the results. This could find discussions or specific posts with unusual combinations of words, which was great when you knew were looking for something very specific and obscure. Now this hardly ever works, and instead they just ignore your extra term.

Sometimes the search engine “AI assistants” can find these things if you prompt correctly, which is maybe the most useful application of AI that I’ve found. But even then they often don’t seem to search that deeply, and often they will just assume that your query is invalid and gaslight you.

[whilenot-dev]

There's a whole list of search operators: https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/#li...

[lelandfe]

Given that that page describes quotes as "working," I'm not so sure how much effort was put into its testing.

[msephton]

YouTube is different from Google.

[msephton]

Then it's a good job we're talking about YouTube, not Google search, and that I tested what I described before posting.

[kristopolous]

if there's no way to successfully attest competency then you are allocating your time poorly.