I just want to know what they gain from fucking up the search functionality so bad.
Every search engine blows now, this is common knowledge. Doesn't matter if it's Google or Bing or even Yandex, they all conveniently started to suck ass at finding relevant results around the same time. Can't have the unwashed masses learning about things from sources not approved by the ministry of truth after all.
As reprehensible as that is I understand that they were probably paid big bucks to do so and at the end of the day that's all a corporation cares about.

What do they gain by fucking up youtube search though?
It's insane how often I want to find an old or obscure video and I simply can't. The top results are videos from youtube superstar faggots with a gorillion subscribers where the term I searched for is either completely or only barely related.
After that you get a bunch of "shorts" clogging up the results because we gotta compete with tiktok on the same platform as our long form content for some reason.
Beyond that you're officially in no mans land where nothing is related to your query and 90% of the videos are presented by ganesh kumar speaking in some unholy combination of hindi and english. Ganesh has kindly titled the video and tagged it in English so that all those western hindi speakers get to enjoy his content too.

I don't get it. Was there really that much forbidden knowledge hidden away on yt that they needed to lobotomize search?
They already censor stuff by straight up removing it from the results page, surely that would have sufficed if they just wanted to suppress certain things. Instead they went full scorched earth and now no-one can find anything.
I just wish I had the foresight to see this coming before it happened so I could have at the very least bookmarked those cool videos if not use yt-dlp and save them.

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