[lairv]

Worth noting that most of youtube videos can no longer be discovered through search. Search results can now only be sorted by "Relevance" and "Popularity" while you used to be able to sort by release date

Search results are also non-exhaustive and biased towards recent videos as noted in this study https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11727

Basically many videos can no longer be discovered if you don't have a url to the video or the channel, and the algorithm doesn't recommend it

[dyauspitr]

The non exhaustive thing is annoying as hell. You might as well delete old videos because there’s no way to get to them if you don’t remember the link. I used to be able to find this video I took in college 20 years ago. There’s just no way for me to get to it anymore.

[rschneid]

Sounds like a good opportunity for a big indexing company to add some value by using thei-

Wait...

[mixmastamyk]

Is that related to freetube removing the video tab (of a channel), sort by age dropdown menu?

[dyauspitr]

I don’t know. All I know is the video I’m looking for has a very unique title and used to come up as the main search result less than 3 years ago and it’s unfindable now. It’s from 2006.

[NJRBailey]

I've noticed that the search is especially bad on the history tab, where even searching the exact title of a video I've seen before doesn't always display it. I've found that the best search for old or niche videos is to ask Gemini with a description of the video (I found it gives better results than GPT 5.1) but it's really unfortunate that the native search isn't more useful.

[Ferret7446]

Realistically you cannot make every video discoverable given the massive ever growing amount of content.

[lairv]

Wikipedia says there's 14.8 billion videos currently uploaded to YouTube, it seems technically easy to index that amount of title+description?

The more likely explanation is that Google doesn't want YouTube to be crawled, which gives them a massive moat for AI training

[squishy47]

you can add search filters to the search bar in youtube.

e.g this will return videos published in that time range with a duration longer than 2m

cat videos after:2014-01-01 before:2014-12-31 >2m

[edit] - the duration doesn't remove shorts I think there's just no shorts published in that time range.