Cited on HN 3 times, 2024, never outright recommendedscore 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Cited as a concrete example of YouTube and Google search failing to find content by exact title.
A short comedic complaint by ProZD about YouTube search failing to surface his own video even when searching its exact title. It illustrates how poor search results have become.
“Here's the video for anyone curious” (HN, 2024)
2 citations · 1 critical · Comedy · news from the time
Here's the video for anyone curious: [this video] tl;dw: First, he searches the exact name of the video on YouTube: it shows a fan-made animated skit of it, the wrong videos but from the right channel, and several re-uploads with only a few hundred views. Second, he adds the channel name before the name of the video in the search bar. Same results. Third, he tries searching for a famous line from the video: still no luck. Finally, he sorts by view count and it shows up, but still not as the first result. Is this some obscure video from some obscure channel? Nope, the video has 15 million views from a channel with 3.91 million subscribers that uploads videos regularly. He has a verified account which was created in 2006. I just tried doing the same search as he did in an incognito window, and it also didn't show up for me until I sorted by view count. I ran it on archive.today, and while it has slightly different results than what I got, nowhere in the search results does it ever show the original video with 15 million views. [link]
Shows YouTube search failing to surface a famous video by exact title.
Sounds similar to what happened with ProZD's video which wasn't political or controversial: [this video] follow up - [link] It was flagged internally as high-risk and removed from the search rankings.
What? Where do you come up with this? Expecting to see the original video by the creator when you search for the exact title of that video , verbatim, is not a self-nullifying mysterious goal. Google fails at this (deliberately, I can only assume): [this video]
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