You search for “blah”, Google gives you a bunch of bad results, and serves up 5 ads. Nothing matches what you want, so you search again “blah but not foo” and you get another 5 ads. If search were good you’d only see 5 ads, but because it sucks you get 10 ads.
If Google had real competitors, bad search results might mean people would give up and use a competitor’s search, but because they have a search monopoly, they can enshittify their results and show even more ads without losing users.
I switched to startpage for this very reason, and it was better for a while! Now its not as good and I’m thinking of going Duck. Idk man, someone needs to reinvent old Google’s search alg.
They are incentivised because showing accurate results for what you asked for isn’t necessarily the best way to keep people on the platform.
By pushing certain types of videos, such as opinionated content or loud shouty videos for low attention spans, YouTube hopes to keep you engaged for longer than they would by being accurate.
There’s also a direct advertising reason to funnel certain types of video. YouTube creators earn different amounts of money for the same number of views depeding on what category (e.g. financial, gaming, writing advice, cookery etc) YT has auto-categorised your video as. We can infer from this that advertisers are willing to pay more money for ads in some categories than others, and therefore YT is directly incentivised to push those more lucrative categories in search results, even if they aren’t what you wanted.
Plenty of reasons why they want to mess with results.
I know the general term, but I don’t see how in this case still. On somewhere like amazon, there’s a clear incentive to have bad search, initially to capture sellers, then later to force them to pay to be high in search results, but youtube has no such program. You can’t pay to be higher in search results.
In general these corpos are interested in keeping you on their platforms to sell you more shit, ie ads. They do this by suggesting you controversial shit for further engagement. You can clearly see this when browsing shorts on YT.
but I don’t understand, how does having shitty search help improve advertiser revenue
You search for “blah”, Google gives you a bunch of bad results, and serves up 5 ads. Nothing matches what you want, so you search again “blah but not foo” and you get another 5 ads. If search were good you’d only see 5 ads, but because it sucks you get 10 ads.
If Google had real competitors, bad search results might mean people would give up and use a competitor’s search, but because they have a search monopoly, they can enshittify their results and show even more ads without losing users.
I switched to startpage for this very reason, and it was better for a while! Now its not as good and I’m thinking of going Duck. Idk man, someone needs to reinvent old Google’s search alg.
They are incentivised because showing accurate results for what you asked for isn’t necessarily the best way to keep people on the platform.
By pushing certain types of videos, such as opinionated content or loud shouty videos for low attention spans, YouTube hopes to keep you engaged for longer than they would by being accurate.
There’s also a direct advertising reason to funnel certain types of video. YouTube creators earn different amounts of money for the same number of views depeding on what category (e.g. financial, gaming, writing advice, cookery etc) YT has auto-categorised your video as. We can infer from this that advertisers are willing to pay more money for ads in some categories than others, and therefore YT is directly incentivised to push those more lucrative categories in search results, even if they aren’t what you wanted.
Plenty of reasons why they want to mess with results.
In a word, Enshittification. The original Cory Doctorow article explaining it
I know the general term, but I don’t see how in this case still. On somewhere like amazon, there’s a clear incentive to have bad search, initially to capture sellers, then later to force them to pay to be high in search results, but youtube has no such program. You can’t pay to be higher in search results.
In general these corpos are interested in keeping you on their platforms to sell you more shit, ie ads. They do this by suggesting you controversial shit for further engagement. You can clearly see this when browsing shorts on YT.