Went to YouTube to find the George HW Bush baseball meme. The search term pops up but the result is nowhere to be seen. Eight videos of bush doing the first pitch and then snl sketches. Went to google, similarly no results. Went to duckduckgo and got it immediately.
Like shits unusable, if someone dislikes a video and has money they absolutely can get it taken off the search systems most people use.
I use youtube a lot, and yeah, the search function went to absolute dogshit over the past few months.
I've also noticed that whenever I watch any sort of leftist content now, the top recommended vid will be something from CNN or MSNBC or whatever. And I don't even live in the US.
They pretty obviously boost "legit" sources to combat disinformation and Russian lies and shit. It started with just medical/nutrition data early on in COVID and now it's morphed to damn near anything you search for.
Yep, it was an announced change, and since then almost every leftist video will autoplay John Oliver (if it was comedy), MSNBC (if it wasn't) or often Tucker Fucking Carlson (if YouTube is feeling sadistic, or if the topic is dominated by right wingers, like CRT or something)
Like imagine, just imagine trying to "deradicalize" your content by switching users from some harmless YouTube socdem to insane white nationalist great replacement theory Tucker Fucking Carlson.
i remember having a lot of trouble finding the video of young biden saying desegregation bussing creates a racial jungle.
Google is getting bad but youtube is absolutely fucking unusable. The search function literally does not work. If you search something you get about 12 results based on the query, and then the rest is half algorithmically determined to be "similar", and the other half, most egregiously, is "for you" algorithm completely unrelated to the search query. I cannot fathom how anybody is okay with this. If I search something, I want to SEARCH for it. If I wanted your shitty algorithm I would go to the front page, which I never fucking do.
Yeah it's so fucking bad. If they had a "see more results" button or whatever, then fine I guess, but you don't even get that.
First time it happened I genuinely thought something was broken, but no.
God no fucking kidding. Like, you can't look up anything meme-related because the search will just be filled with the most vile nazi memes. It wasn't always that way, it's pretty obvious they're putting their dicks on the scale.
It's one thing to be biased, but it's become literally unusable as a search engine.
Not really my area of expertise. Whenever I need to find something I just ask my community.
The fact that sourcing is mandated goes a long way in preventing the need to even use search engines.
It has been getting progressively worse especially over the past year. Even in the last month I can see a noticeable difference. Searched for a couple of things tonight that I had recently searched for and had found but this time it was just unrelated nonsense. Straight to duckduckgo and got what I was looking for instantly.
As someone with knowledge in the area, SEO has been in a terminal spiral for 18 months. We've seen a couple of these before, but this is the worst one since the days of Yahoo and Altavista. Marketers are eating their own seedcorn, Google is sacrificing it's algorithm to maintain ad spend, and it's all in a massive race to the bottom. I reckon we're about 8 months out of a major reset of Google on at least a Panda/Penguin level.
This is far too interesting a thing to hear about for you to not go into more depth. What’re the major changes that are unique to the past 18 months?
Nothing unique, just a continuation of SEO tactics of the last decade. Link buying is universal and google can't stop it, content mills now have high-quality writers and can fool algorithmic attempts. Spammy sites get more ctr and influencer advertising has completely fucked up search volumes and such. Display Advertising is dead, finally, and search ad volumes are decreasing as well. Google is basically floating on shopping ads and attempting to support them in organic results, which has resulted in "wish-itis". YouTube ads are barely paying server costs, and businesses advertising on online channels are seeing low ROI due to market fatigue.
On the Social Front, Facebook is in terminal decline, and influencer advertising is dying at a rapid rate. Major businesses are pulling out of Social and sometimes out of Digital.
I reckon we’re about 8 months out of a major reset of Google on at least a Panda/Penguin level.
what will happen?
From what I've heard (and this is hearsay), a massive overhaul of both SEO and SEM rankings from the ground up, integration of the search algorithm with SEM to improve search ad quality. Hammering of dropshipping and similar spammy e-commerce, and an attempt, probably futile, to put mid-size e-commerce sites front and center. Links will become less important relative to long-form content and interactive elements. Site age and update rate will continue to grow in importance.
Further integration of AI-driven natural language analysis to stop content mills. There have, apparently, been discussions about manually boosting high content sites as well but not sure about that.
Basically actually doing what they've been threatening to do for 10 years.
Social Media is also in trouble with major brands starting to bail entirely. Influencer advertising is in freefall in terms of profitability.
Glad I'm not the only one noticing it. It seems to just keep getting worse. One thing I've noticed, besides what other people have mentioned, is that I used to be able to search for questions about video game mechanics or solutions or whatever and get links to the game wiki, forum posts, or even walkthroughs. Now I have to wade through a dozen nearly identical articles that I can only assume are algorithmically generated that spend hundreds of words to answer a simple question. The same thing has happened for patch notes, and most fucking infuriating of all: tech support.
Good golly gosh is it rough searching a problem you have with windows or some software these days. It's just a pile of results that give the same fucking series of troubleshooting tips and then direct you to some garbage software.
It drives me fuckin crazy.
Most complicated technical questions are best answered by adding site:reddit.com to the query. Nowadays, that's the only way not to get a stupid blog article vaguely related to the most commercially valuable words that happen to be in your search.
Typically it's someone actually putting their reputation on the line to answer a question that another real human has asked.
Are you sure you wouldn't like a "video tutorial", instead of a nice text document that you could easily scan over and search at your own pace?
Related watch: Dead Internet Theory
It delves into lib "both sides" bullshit at times, but on the whole it has a lot of good stuff about how a huge amount of internet content nowadays is astroturfed, bot-driven, and algorithm-curated. It uses the manufacturing of consent for the War in Afghanistan as an example.
