You don’t need me to tell you that YouTube is getting worse in all sorts of ways. From clickbait thumbnails to AI slop to Shorts being shoved into every corner of the service (and much more), it’s harder than ever to navigate and find what you’re looking for on YouTube.
It’s interesting to take a closer examination of one specific area of big problems like this to break them down. I recently had a renewed realization of how poor YouTube’s search results are, which I shouldn’t be surprised at, given how Google’s results have degraded over recent years.
Finding clear, human-made videos should not be this hard
- YouTube shows you all the junk first
- 01 YouTube Results Showing Shorts
While writing my recent piece about how much speed you need from your ISP, I wanted to include a YouTube video that succinctly showed the differences between high and low ping while gaming. I’ve included similar videos illustrating various frame rates in games, so I figured one about ping would be easy to find.
I was terribly wrong, to the point where if you read that article, you’ll know it didn’t feature such a video. Let’s step through YouTube’s results for “game ping latency comparison” to illustrate this.
- Shorts are a plague on YouTube
- I don’t want to see them on desktop
- 02 YouTube Ping Results Part 1
First, we get a carousel of five Shorts. I despise these and wish you could hide them from the site (without using extensions to alter YouTube).
If you want to open a dedicated Shorts tab on your phone and scroll through those, fine. But I don’t want to see made-for-mobile videos as the first result on my desktop computer. They also have less text space for the title, so it’s harder to know if the video is what you’re looking for.
Taking the content on its own merits, the first video is well-made, but it doesn’t answer the question. It compares internet speed and ping for gaming, but doesn’t illustrate how increasing ping values affect gameplay.
The second video is an ad for an ISP company, then the third is a basic explanation of ping using generic stock footage. The fourth is an AI voiceover showing little of value. Meanwhile, the final one has zero views, terrible audio quality, and serves to promote a paid lag-reducing service.
Why are these the top five results when I’m looking for a comparison of high and low ping? None of them even comes close to what I’ve searched for.
More shorts, AI slop, and other garbage
This feels like page 20 of Google
03 YouTube Ping Results Part 2
Continuing, the “normal” results start with yet another Short. The video is, again, a baseline explanation of ping. It comes from an AI garbage channel with under 600 subscribers, using watermarked stock footage and an AI voiceover.
The next is the first non-Short video, but it doesn’t fulfill the search intent either. It compares the definitions of latency and ping, instead of showing how different ping values manifest.
After that, we get yet another round of Shorts. I’ll skip these for the sake of brevity, but know that they have the same problems with being low-quality and not answering what I came for.