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Both have been prioritising "engagement" over "results" because it allows them to advertise to you more.
In case you didn't realise, if the product is free, you're the product and both have been doing an amazing job out of extracting value from your eyeballs.
Unsurprisingly, they're both owned by the same company.
Yes! I've been 'degoogling' for a while. Shifted email, searching, shopping etc elsewhere.
However, Cory Doctorow ('Enshittification') points out that even if you're the advertiser or business customer, you're the product. They get screwed as well. Companies that are too big to care are extracting value from everyone. The policy decisions that allowed them to get that way were made in living memory by named individuals, and can be reversed.
The "results" portion they got rid of is credibility of the results based on cross linking i.e. people linking to useful resources. It was the thing that made Google the best search engine.
Noe they prioritise what sell the most ads as the top priority.
It's so bad. I keep searching topics on YouTube and getting 3-4 results before YouTube starts recommending videos based on past searches or past watched videos. Like, excuse me YouTube, what the fuck? You search what I tell you to search.
All the categories seems wildly divorced from what’s actually in them and half the time the category only suggests two videos… to me it feels like YouTube decides what you watch, today your suggestions are 90% old music videos, tomorrow a bunch of random machining videos, next day fail videos, rinse and repeat - obviously it’s based on your interests not mine but I’m sure everyone is having the same shitty experience
It also feels like some pages in top results didn't even exist before I made the search. They are filled with generic babble about the subject without ever going to details or conclusions. Dribble that no human would ever write
Dunno about Google but Youtube seems to be making some things harder on purpose, like seeing the date of a video or showing search results in chronological order.
Extensions are your friend. I've had to install several just to make YouTube useable!
If I need to go find something to make a service useable that’s my sign to not use the service.
I'd be interested to know if there's a way to fix this issue with extensions. Do you mean browser extensions? I use a browser sometimes and newpipe sometimes.
Using a browser and ublock origin, I find viewing youtube to work ok except for the occasional age gated video that I can't view without a google account. What's stopped working is search ordering and seeing timestamps. Like old comments might get labelled "2 years ago" with mouse-over no longer showing the actual date/time. It's not shown in the unrendered HTML in any obvious way either.
Not commnenting on the efficacy of the following for everyone, but they help me:
Disable Autoplay for YouTube https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/disable-autoplay-for-yout/dinkeiniijmpjehejhedbciaedblhnnk?pli=1
Return YouTube Dislike https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/return-youtube-dislike/gebbhagfogifgggkldgodflihgfeippi
U-Block Origin, obviously (still works fully on Brave Browser) https://ublockorigin.com/
Untrap for YouTube (Block YouTube Shorts & Remove Recommendations) https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/untrap-for-youtube-%E2%80%94-bloc/enboaomnljigfhfjfoalacienlhjlfil
YouTube Channel Blocker https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-channel-blocker/ghpibapiigafgbaolopljimengkfjofk
YouTube Upload Time https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-upload-time/nenoecmaibjcahoahnmeinahlapheblg
YTBlock - Block any content from YouTube https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ytblock-block-any-content/nedcanggplmbbgmlpcjiafgjcpdimpea
Some of these probably cross over in what they do, but I can't be arsed delving into the nooks and crannies of them, so long as they do the job for me.
Thanks, I don't see any of those fixing the functionality that youtube broke, but the effort is appreciated. The one that shows the upload time only says you can use it while watching the video, but that time is shown in the text blurb if you click "more...". And it makes a network request, of course. I'm using firefox so ublock origin still works for blocking ads.
Nice list, appreciate it! Unlock Origin seems to still work on Firefox too.
Yes. I have regularly been using DDG, but would wind up using google sometimes anyway. Now I’m actively forced to use other engines because google is now a monetized results server and will return zero or no relevant results in favor or sponsored or monetized results.
Yet another on the endless list of reasons why capitalism is bad for humanity.
DDG is worse though—so much of the time all I get are pages that were created by an LLM to be search engine optimized. Hollow language and a table of contents just so they can tell me how long to cook rice
It's on purpose. The longer you scroll, the longer you're on the platform. That's higher engagement numbers and is used to expose you to/negotiate higher prices from advertisements.
They want you to give up on search and ask their AI
I honestly think this is one of the reasons AI is so popular with people. We didn't notice because we have been using ddg, and adblocks. But searching for things in google, and finding any decent sites that's related and not shoving down ads all over the screen is hard to find.
Then people found something where they just search/ask things and get answers without any of the hassle. If you don't care about the source, or want to check multiple views then you have what you want. Specially because I think lot of people seem to use google to just find what they already have bias towards.
I'm annoyed that YT got rid of the search by newest first option. At least Rumble has it still
That feeling when you're trying to browse through a creator you like's page for videos you haven't seen yet, but you have to scroll past the dozens and dozens of things you've already watched, which each take time to load their thumbnails, making the task drag on for ages.
Yeah, the recommended videos is completely broken. It used to be good.
Yes. It’s becoming shittier everyday.
It's been bad for a few years already but it is getting worse. A good chunk of the internet isn't indexing anymore (places which require logins to get the content), and those that are largely exist to earn from the advertising, not to be helpful.
There's actually an opportunity for a disruptive force here. If you can be better at search than Google, you could steal users. But duckduckgo and related are mostly trying to be old Google rather than better Google.
I just love how YouTube has a "show unwatched" button in its search that usually shows me videos I have watched multiple times.
Probably because it's prioritising what it thinks you're more likely to click on more than the actual search term. AI recommendations basically.
Which sucks when you're the kind of person that craves novelty. Just because I watched a nature documentary about sharks doesn't mean all I want to watch are shark videos. YouTube doesn't seem to understand that.
Thankfully, a lot of people gave really good suggestions when I made this Ask Lemmy post a few months ago. I'm still working my way down the list. Whenever YouTube search fails to give me something new or interesting, I check back on that page and pick a channel somebody suggested. Otherwise, the algorithm gets real stale, real quick.
Use duckduckgo and turn off ai results. Problem solved.
month on month, everything gets worse and more noise to filter out. Can't be the only one with this sentiment.
What you're seeing is called 'enshittification'. In this particular example, in 2019, Prabhakar Raghavan – the ex-McKinsey, ex-Yahoo MBA who ran ad revenue for Google – came up with an ingenious solution: just make search worse. If you have to run multiple searches to find what you're looking for, that creates multiple chances to show you an ad. No really. This is real. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Why do people put up with this? You can find out more about enshittification here:
Short explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2e-c9SF5nE
Longer explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZaoWpQ-3Zs
Enshittification is a modern way of saying late stage capitalism. As long as we submit to capital and reject collectivism this will always be the course
Yes, the 'greed is good' neoliberal lunatics have taken over the economics asylum and are privileging capital over labour.
However, Doctorow specifically addresses the question, 'Isn't enshittification just late-stage capitalism'. He talks about specific government policy decisions, made by named individuals, that have ensured that the people making the worst choices will 'succeed' in business at the expense of human rights. He wants us to fight for elected governments not to be pushed around by monopolies and oligarchs, and for a 'new good internet' where adversarial interoperability is allowed to mitigate the worst crimes of the enshittifiers.
Use something else like Kagi or duckduckgo
Yup. I had this exact thought YESTERDAY, when I did a search for the name of a GitHub project I needed to read up on (I forget which project), with a couple keywords, and the GitHub page wasn't even IN the top results. Later, I was doing a search for a quoted phrase, which of course is supposed to guarantee that the phrase appears, verbatim, in the results, and found that NONE of the results contained that phrase.
And no, I wasn't looking at the AI results, I've got those removed with a plugin.
I was trying to find an anklet, obviously size matters if it’s intended to fit my body and I put “eight inch anklet” in quotes along with a few other adjectives and it flat out ignored it and gave me mostly 9” because that’s the standard size of an anklet… wtf is even the point
It's all monetization directed, no matter what. Boolean search is gone.
Search has been becoming smarter for years (decades?) by now.
The problem is that search has been made to work with the "you know what I mean" factor... fixing spelling mistakes, considering different tenses or forms of words, including related words...
Search became more friendly to the average non-technical user, but it became harder for users who know/knew how to search for exactly what they want.
Other factors include...
Yes! It's very hard to find alternatives to social media sites through google. Get choked in dozens of whiny blogs of 'social media isn't what it used to be' articles instead. Had to find duck duck go on yahoo then find alternative social media sites on duck duck go.
I use DDG, but search quality on google is unmatched
In match in what sense? Because google has become nigh useless to me. I'm relying hard on LLMs to provide links because google never gives me any relevant response anymore -- and I'm not even talking about sponsored content here, which makes things worse in some cases
Yes, it is one of the main reasons I started paying for Kagi. Google search is designed first and foremost to serve you up to advertisers who pay Google.
I wonder what would happen if we all just signed off for the rest of the year.
Yes
Not on YouTube since most things I search for are on the 1st few videos. For google, yes. ive stopped using it and primarily use ddg