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Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find
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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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While Web search has gotten worse, Youtube has gotten pretty good at finding niche content with a few dozens views. In general it seems most user generated content these days is on Youtube as video, not on the Web as text. The typical Web SOC spam doesn't really exist on Youtube outside of a few crypto scams here and there.
For quite a while by now. Three years ago or so they started recommending older content again, instead of focusing exclusively on new stuff. And since than I frequently end up on videos and tiny channels with just hundreds of views. Meanwhile on a regular Google Web search I literally never end up on somebodies random private homepage, I have to remember that Marginalia exist if I ever wanna see one of those.
Youtube of course still favors professional monetized content, but random niche content still ends up making its way to the top surprisingly often. Youtube also does a pretty good job of not recommending me popular content that is irrelevant to me, all those channels with tens of million of views I can see on the Trending-page, they never make it into my normal Youtube browsing.
Found something new today
I hadn't thought about this, but you may be on to something. I had a car issue, googled it, found nothing but crap and generic articles. I searched the same on YouTube and found a couple videos about fixing the exact issue on my type of car.
Really interesting observation.
The trouble with that is that videos are much harder to reference than text. If someone slaps a [citation needed] on a claim I'm making, I may have to track down the video, find the right time stamp, and link that. And then they will probably say that YouTube isn't a valid source, even if it comes from a relatively reputable creator (I've had people say this for a Tom Scott video where he was interviewing a subject matter expert in the topic).
This is all so much easier with blogs. Even if people should be a little more skeptical of blogs, at least a blog can link its own sources more easily than YouTube to get to something more reputable.