
How Do I Get Rid of Search Results from India? - tomerbd
https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/9262123?hl=en
======
wsxcde
Some people on the website are complaining that people are putting their video
titles in English but the content is in some other language. This is not a
lame attempt to get more clicks, but driven by the fact that: (i) Hindi typing
works only somewhat well on mobile phones and does not work at all on most
desktops/laptops in India, and (ii) search in languages like Hindi sucks even
more. Given that most tech savvy Indians are bilingual anyway, it just makes
sense to have titles in English so that people can search for them
conveniently.

You'll see this is something even Hindi newspapers do. I pulled these two
articles from the front pages of the Dainik Jagran and Dainik Bhaskar, two of
the bigger Hindi newspapers: [1] and [2]. Very little of the content, except
for the title is in Hindi. This is so that people can search for content using
English searches.

[1] [https://www.bhaskar.com/bihar/patna/news/prashant-kishor-
pol...](https://www.bhaskar.com/bihar/patna/news/prashant-kishor-political-
strategist-bihar-patna-visit-latest-news-and-updates-on-former-jdu-national-
president-126775173.html?ref=ht) [2] [https://www.jagran.com/politics/state-
up-budget-2020-yogi-ad...](https://www.jagran.com/politics/state-up-
budget-2020-yogi-adityanath-government-will-focused-on-overall-development-
budget-over-five-lac-crores-20040808.html?src=p1)

~~~
roelschroeven
Weirs, when I visit those sites almost everything is in a script I can't read.
Only a tiny bit is in English.

This is what the sites look like for me:
[https://imgur.com/a/h6U1Un1](https://imgur.com/a/h6U1Un1)

~~~
wsxcde
Sorry I had a typo. I meant to say very little of the content is in English.
But the page title is in English and that matters because I can google for
"Jagran UP budget" to get to the second article.

~~~
ThePowerOfFuet
Have you considered editing your previous comment?

~~~
wsxcde
HN doesn't allow edits after a few hours.

------
vijucat
You can personalize the recommendations by clicking on the 3-dot menu and
selecting "Not interested" and/or "Don't recommend channel". It even asks
"Tell us why". I'm Indian and I hardly see any Indian videos. Here are my
recommendations right now:

[https://imgur.com/a/KlSamZA](https://imgur.com/a/KlSamZA)

(Basically Anjunadeep, Patrice O' Neal, and Batman :-) ).

I believe their recommendation ML is top-notch and they keep improving it. For
example, it seems to have finally learned that I absolutely effing hate
"reaction" videos (it used to struggle with that ~ 1 year ago).

~~~
mikekchar
I never noticed that. Thank you so much! Hope it helps recommendations for me.

------
kburman
Reading the comments there feels more like targeting a community rather than a
real inconvenience.

Some of the example -

> thanks man, i thought my pc was infected with an indain virus. sounds like
> its not only me ....

> İ sicked of fucking indi*n videos on youtube.

> This is so true, I totally hate those indian video

I feel that the real problem is understanding the Indian accent.

~~~
vezycash
The main problem FOR ME is the title. It's in English. No indication that it's
in Hindi.

I watch some Chinese / Japanese channels but I know what I'm going into before
hand. Because both the channel name and the title would have hyrogliphs.

I wouldn't mind if I had unlimited data. But I can download 10 tutorial videos
based on their title only for 3-5 to be Hindi.

Google search has been proven to forget old excellent articles. I think this
amnesia is happening to YouTube as well.

~~~
kburman
Disclaimer: I'm an Indian.

We all have English keyboards and use it all day(I don't know whom you want to
blame for this.)

So it's easy for us to read and write in English. We even type Hindi in
English.
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinglish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinglish))

~~~
vezycash
Some people add (Hindi) to their video titles. So the keyboard isn't to blame.

~~~
amf12
For some people in India, it is difficult to read Hindi because it is not
their first language. They can understand spoken Hindi. So some of these
videos add English title so that everyone can read the title and listen to
Hindi video.

~~~
vezycash
[https://youtu.be/WgcjvcKHZKE](https://youtu.be/WgcjvcKHZKE)

See how the YouTuber put Hindi in the title of that video? That's what I'm
talking about

~~~
amf12
I agree with your sentiment, and feel that YouTube should add a language tag
rather than uploaders having to do this.

------
mangatmodi
Sarcasm Alert - Hey, as an Indian I am tired of American English videos. The
accent is so bad, I can't understand anything!!

Btw, it looks like a good problem to solve. It is not easy to ML millions of
videos to identify spoken language, but I guess google already has means to do
it as they provide closed caption.

Also, the YouTubers in the comments seems to be searching for IT topics, which
is heavily dominated by Indians

~~~
puranjay
I would honestly be happy if there was a way to filter out content from Indian
users on sites like Quora. And I say this as an Indian.

~~~
bhaavan
The fact that you use quora, a network very popular in India, and expect
indian content to not be there is like going to a Italian restaurant and
asking why is the menu full of pastas.

~~~
puranjay
I don't use Quora. Quora just pops up in my search results all the time.

There is nothing innately Indian about Quora. Indians are just overrepresented
on it.

~~~
zakember
Just add '-site:quora.com' to your search query to avoid Quora altogether

------
awiesenhofer
I noticed this too the other way round: as a german native speaker i notice
more and more videos in youtubes recommendations that are just popular english
videos with german titles. i somehow always assumed these are automatic
translations from youtube itself.

~~~
LeonM
Yes, these are automatically translated by YT. I'm seeing a lot of video
titles that have suddenly been translated to Dutch when I log in. I find this
very annoying and have been looking how to turn it off, but couldn't find it.

In my observation not all videos have translated titles, I'd say about 20~30%.
So my theory is that it is either some A/B test from YT, or that the channel
owner can opt in/out of the automatic translations.

~~~
kumpelblase2
The only way I've managed to turn it off is by changing the language of
youtube to be English (I've had it in my native language before).

~~~
jvzr
I'm French but have everything in English (system, browser & YouTube). I've
seen a lot of French YouTube videos with their title auto-translated in
English a couple of weeks after their diffusion.

(Bad for two reasons: (1) badly translated titles, sometimes hilariously so,
and (2) the algorithm recommends me videos I have already watched. I guess (2)
is because I don't usually watch the last 20 seconds, the static "my last
video was", whatever it's called, so YouTube must think I haven't watched the
video. Most times, the red gauge below the video thumbnail shows half-full
even though I've watched the video minus these 20 seconds. There's still room
for improvements...)

------
MaximumYComb
I'm assuming the poster is searching for videos in a niche IT area. Whenever
I'm digging into a computer science topic I get tons of Indian videos. They're
in English with a thick Indian accent. If you are able to understand the
accent they're actually decent videos.

------
CiPHPerCoder
The comments in that discussion seem a bit xenophobic.

There _is_ value in being able to reliably filter by language. After all, if
you can't understand a lecture video, then there's little point in watching
it.

But how some of the commenters choose to express their thoughts comes across
more as "I hate people from India" than "This is inconvenient".

~~~
fellellor
There is too much of that going around these days. Almost as if it’s in
fashion. It doesn’t really bother me, except for the ones saying, "I’m Indian
too, and I hate my kind".

Also, some might not know this, but English is pretty widely spoken in India.
It’s common to come across words from many languages, including English,
interspersed in conversations.

And also, my YouTube is filled with these elaborate cooking videos from China
and east Asia. Tech content from Germany, that I can’t understand. It’s never
really bothered me though.

In general, it’s accurate to say that I’ve never come across great videos
because YouTube recommended them to me.

~~~
SyneRyder
_> my YouTube is filled with these elaborate cooking videos from China and
east Asia. Tech content from Germany, that I can’t understand. It’s never
really bothered me though._

I'm a little confused at how people are getting these bad recommendations from
YouTube, because my recommendations - at least on my Samsung TV's YouTube app
- are mostly spot on. It knows I'm interested in music production, long form
studio tours and interviews, 8-bit retro gear & repair, and that's pretty much
all it recommends. It can infer that from my subscriptions, but seems to go
more by what I actually watch & like.

I assume you are clicking like on the videos that you enjoyed? Do you treat
YouTube like a spam filter and rate things as "Not Interested" if it
recommends something wrong? Or maybe Google's algorithms are just really
really terrible outside of US / UK / Canada / Aus?

On the other hand, my recommendations on the mobile app aren't as good. It's
almost as if YouTube treats each client as a separate account/context, even
though I'm signed in on all of them.

~~~
fellellor
> I assume you are clicking like on the videos that you enjoyed? Do you treat
> YouTube like a spam filter and rate things as "Not Interested" if it
> recommends something wrong?

I do those things often, but not all the time. They usually recommend every
single video from a random channel, if you happen to watch just one of their
videos. So it’s not all the popular Chinese cooking videos, rather all the
videos from this one channel alone. That sort of stuff. Almost like they want
some people to get large followings and become influencers, because it’s more
profitable to have influencers on your platform rather than having many great
videos from different creators.

In a way I’m happy that YouTube recommendations are not so great. That way at
least, I’ll not get hooked on the platform and be even more of a time wasting
failure than I already am.

------
_-___________-_
I seem to have thoroughly confused Google with regard to my
region/language/currency preferences. Youtube regularly shows me videos in
German, Google Maps keeps reverting to UAE dirhams for the currency it shows
prices in, and Google Search always opens in Chinese.

I use Google products in a Firefox container which is always logged in to my
Google account, which should contain enough information for them to understand
that I read English best and would prefer prices to be shown in Euros (or any
of a list of maybe 10 other currencies before I would consider dirhams), but
there you go.

~~~
londons_explore
Most Google engineers are comfy sitting in the USA where "use IP location
detection, map the country to a default language, and use that" sounds fine.

------
DrinkWater
I noticed this on Youtube: i keep getting more and more Indian Videos, for
reasons unknown to me. I am not really "pissed off" by this, but a lot of
these videos are just hard to understand for me, so it feels like a bad UX for
me.

What really annoys me is that Google in general is pushing German content into
my face, despite the fact that my OS, my browser-settings, my Google profiles
and my search queries are 100% English. Just the fact that i am physically
located in Germany seems to be enough for them.

I started switching to Google-alternative products almost 1.5 years ago
because i am tired of them.

~~~
lopmotr
This whole language choosing thing seems to be an unsolved problem. It would
be great if users could specify their preferred languages somehow in their
browser/OS and websites and apps could respect that. But I guess users won't
set it properly so websites will try to second-guess them.

You used to be able to do something like google.com/ncr to get US English
Google but that doesn't seem to work anymore :( Too many people thinking they
know what they want, I guess.

~~~
viceroyalbean
>It would be great if users could specify their preferred languages somehow in
their browser/OS and websites and apps could respect that

There is[1], but no one uses it. At this point its primary purpose is probably
just browser fingerprinting.

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Accept-Language)

------
aviraldg
Not having search results / videos from languages you do not know is a valid
concern, but some of the comments on that thread are essentially just racist.

I don't understand the complaints about the English accent being bad either,
because there isn't an "ideal" English accent. It's just different. They also
come off as extremely entitled. Guess what, everyone accustomed to a non-UK/US
accent has to get used to them to actually understand pretty much any content
on the web.

------
masayoshis_son
I only search YouTube with Google video search as YouTube's built-in search
always seems to be delivering much less relevant results for me.

Google Search seems to ignore the user's preferred language choice from the
HTTP Accept-Language header and (for a not logged-in user) default to whatever
can be inferred from the IP address/location but at least this behavior can be
overriden.

------
hackerbabz
I’ve never had this happen to me. How common is it?

------
kranner
From one of the comments, it is interesting how "-HINDI" in the search string
does seem to eliminate most Indian videos (even ones in other Indian languages
like Tamil) where "HINDI" does not seem to be present in the video
description.

Looks like a real market need here, although maybe limited to videos in a
particular segment (I searched for "Angular tutorial" for this example),
because somehow I don't get these Indian hits at all -- despite being Indian
and living in India.

------
switchb4
The poster did not say what exactly is his problem with indian videos. Because
he did not say if the videos he encounters are not in English.

