It's vector search that's eaten everything that used to have at least a smidgen of parametric search.
reply> YouTube search is genuinely better than Google
replyThe funny part of this is that Google search is intentionally bad at returning YouTube videos, presumably because some anti-trust action scared them into artificially ranking videos from local news sites, Facebook, and other ad-walled content ahead of YouTube videos. Seriously, go watch a YouTube video, then try googling its title with “video” appended to it, and see if the “Videos” tab of google search ranks it as the first result.
The most absurd thing that has happened to me more than once is that I found a YouTube video, not by searching through Google, not by searching through YouTube, not by asking an LLM to find it for me, but by finding an old article that embedded it. That embed is of course long broken by the changes on YouTube's side, but once I use inspect element to find its Youtube ID, surprise, surprise, it's still there!
replyIt's usually uploaded by a channel with like 20 subscribers and has maybe like 300 views, but YouTube would rather show me some artist playing a similar genre on the other side of the continent with millions of views that was recently uploaded than a video from an event I specifically typed into a search bar.