I know it's silly but I sometimes feel anxiety at the prospect of that enormous bank of knowledge getting lost in some way or another (e.g. Google deciding it wants to do something else or some disaster).
The medium-term threat is the gradual replacement of that knowledge in search results with AI para-knowledge that looks plausible but is not actually true or useful.
youtube is doing it's best to now hobble search functionality on youtube, which is already a disaster from a discoverablity perspective. not to mention the huge amount of content that gets deleted due to claims of all kinda of nonsense and other bogus reports and faulty automated detection.
Is there something new they are doing to hobble it (your use of the word "now" suggests so)?
The last things I can think of they did to ruin it is surfacing Shorts and "you may also like" results, but the results themselves were completely broken for many years now (my favourite is when doing a search within a channel, looking for e.g. "Let's play Factorio Episode 98" which will return episodes 97,98 and 101, but not 98 no matter how far you scroll down in the results. If you want to find episode 98, naturally you should search for episode 99 and then it will appear).
YouTube search is so frustrating to use. You search for a specific title, but instead you're usually shown vaguely related popular videos first, and then the actual video you want below those.
But what bothers me the most is that YouTube's data can't be fully indexed by search engines. Recently, I was trying to find the video of a comment I had a picture of, but it was impossible to find because comments aren't indexed at all. While Reddit's search also sucks for example, at least search engines can index Reddit's data and make it possible to search it.
I've tried to find speeches by someone I know the name of, and know basically half the title of the video, and know the context of the video that's for sure in the description or in the comments, and because I got a word or two wrong in the title, I get tons of other videos by the same guy, that have zero of the keywords that I included.
Eventually I find it and I shake my head wondering how YouTube/Google could get this bad.
YouTube gets more minutes watched and ads shown if you discover other videos via search.
It’s not like Google search, where being the best at search is a meaningful competitive advantage and necessary for survival. If YouTube found a credible competitor, I strongly suspect they’d improve their search (from the users’ perspective).
It's often all but impossible to find videos from a few years ago. Wanting to show your now adult children a viral video from a decade and a half ago, nowhere to be found.
Sometimes it feels like you're gaslighting yourself down a memory hole.
If you really like a video on YouTube and think you might want to see it again in the future one day, you must download it and save it. This really goes for just about anything on the internet. You can't trust that anything will still be there after a few years.
It is truly invaluable to _humanity_