I am slightly depressed at how content on the web has evolved in the last decade. More and more content providers (youtube, Hulu, Netflix, etc) make their platforms harder and harder to search. They continue to promote what essentially they want you to consume.. and actual content your looking for is buried.
The other day I wanted to watch the last season of Legion (forget never finished the series) and was looking around for it. Turns out it is indeed on Hulu (which I have) however you would never just stumble on this. Despite my history of watching just about ever comic book series and comic book movie there is. Its almost like they don't have a true interest in pulling up what I want. Instead literally the front page is full of stuff I have zero interest in watching.
It's hard not to get a bit pessimistic about where this is all going, no? It's incredibly frustrating already, that many topics are almost impossible to search for nowadays (just on your favorite search engine). Adding `site:reddit.com` or whatever is the crutch many of us use, but in the end the fundamental problem is of course that less and less content is even available in places anymore that can be properly indexed. Only so much discussion happens on reddit or whatever. :(
I much prefer the old times of searching for some topic on google and if nothing came up, it was really because there likely wasn't significant discussion happening about said topic.
There is no new format [1]. Just stop referring to reddit.com when you think about the site. Go to https://old.reddit.com, and redirect everyone you know to it. Use an extension to redirect when you're not logged in [2]. Also change your site preferences to keep the old version when you are logged in. Everything works as expected.
Side note: If anyone in your life says "I like New Reddit", you have now identified a fundamental point of difference in taste with that person. Use this information wisely.
Reddit needs to realize the asinine mistakes that they have made in this "redesign" that no one asked for. The moment they remove or screw with the old site in any way, I'm gone and never coming back.
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[1] Just in case it isn't clear; this comment contains hyperbole for the sake of a little humor
The redesign does the important job of making the app look better in comparison, as you are reminded every time you load a page (if it loads properly).
I build and play lyres, and there's a thriving community of lyre players in Japan who have put a lot of videos on YouTube. None of them show up in my searches for lyre music, which quickly devolve into people playing funk bass and flying homebuilt airplanes, both of which I like, but still! I had to use NewPipe to search for them, go to YouTube, search for the user name, and subscribe to them before I could find them through YouTube's interface.
I'd search for keyword 'X'. There are some relevant results in the first dozen results, fine. And then I scroll on because I know that there is more, but the search results just... end? Like there's only ever going to be a dozen valid results for any search?
It is a sad day when I have to flip over to bing or somewhere to do a deeper search, rather than staying on-site.
(This is in general a kind of “life hack” — people who speak other languages will often use their own language to title+tag stuff even on otherwise English-language websites; so if you want to find stuff from a specific country, you can often surface higher-relevance content if you put your search keywords in the language that country speaks.)
I'm... honestly not sure. I think I got the right word, but I don't know a breath of Japanese, so I might have copied the wrong one. At any rate, the results of trying it just now were seriously underwhelming.
The trouble with Japanese in particular, but ideograph languages generally, is that the lack of explicit spaces makes tokenization nontrivial (you essentially need to parse words out using a model built on a dictionary) — and English-language websites don’t even bother to think about doing this when trying to build their search engines; they just throw things into Lucene or Postgres tsvector and think the problem solved. This results in indexing document titles in these languages as if they were bags of individual characters (i.e. splitting on every character.)
Other ideograph languages (e.g. Chinese) aren’t so bad when you do this, because enough information is captured per ideograph that losing ordering doesn’t actually change meaning that much. But Japanese is especially bad, because it often “reverts” to the hiragana or katakana alphabets for long strings of words, while still not putting any explicit word-break markers between saidwords. So you end up indexing a “bag of letters.” You can imagine the uselessness of such results.
Or, to put that another way: Japanese-language search “works” on English-language sites when you’re searching a term expressed in kanji. But when the term you want turns out to only have a katakana representation, it’s mostly not going to work.
And yes, Google themselves know all this and have solved all these problems for Google Search long ago. Apparently, the relevant tech never made it into YouTube.
I share the concern but as a web developer, it's pretty clear that keeping people watching a tight, edge-cacheable pool of videos is far cheaper than actual organic usage.
This is a great point. And additionally, when the storage and compute are cloud-based, and they get charged on a per-compute basis, you can start to see why every platform's search has gotten worse: they're incentivized to restrict the amount of searching that happens, because each search requires more compute, and probably compute of things that aren't cached already?
So you limit the amount of search and recommend the cache-able content, and cha-ching.
This is why searching for transactions in Stripe is a disaster, or finding email history in SendGrid is a pain, or any other search function on a sufficiently large data set.
Remember the compute costs: that's why it's purposefully built to be hard to find what you're looking for.
This is my hunch too. By heavily curating all content, a tiny portion will be served to a significant fraction of users, keeping costs lower by reducing the long tail as much as possible.
This started me wondering how Shorts/Reels/etc play into that paradigm. They're a major part these sites these days.
But they're shorter, smaller videos with tighter compression. 1min ~= 5MB, and it's easier to mix people through a pool of these (even allowing for content skews) with a little 200TB edge cluster able to hold 76 years of contiguous programming. Probably more efficient than full-format videos.
Tell me about it. I feel sorry for kids these days who never experienced the golden era. So innocent and simple and fun and curious.
Not good for the mass amounts of information available today, I'm not saying we should "go back to that" but I certainly do miss waking up with hot chocolate in the winter, dialing up 56K and when it finally connects I get a dopamine rush as the world opens up before my fingertips... a world of bad blinking alarm gifs, wild backgrounds, bright times new roman text, and very gray table borders.
I googled Legion, and there's a contextual box that shows it's on Hulu, among other services. I searched DDG for legion, no relevant hits, but when I searched for legion streaming, one of the ads shown is for Legion streaming on Hulu and the first non-ad result is Hulu as well.
I guess my point is, searching for something you want and manually scrolling through a catalog hoping the algorithm bestows a blessing upon you are two different things. If you know what you want to watch, you can find it easily via search. If you don't know what you want to watch, then really, you probably don't want to watch anything, so do what you do want to do. Take an active role in deciding what to do with your free time. Don't rely on some algorithm to make your decisions for you.
The other day I wanted to watch the last season of Legion (forget never finished the series) and was looking around for it. Turns out it is indeed on Hulu (which I have) however you would never just stumble on this. Despite my history of watching just about ever comic book series and comic book movie there is. Its almost like they don't have a true interest in pulling up what I want. Instead literally the front page is full of stuff I have zero interest in watching.