YouTube search broken or returning irrelevant results (recommended videos) for some viewers

YouTube is the go-to platform to watch content from anywhere in the world. Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in October 2006, which looks like a pittance now considering the value of YouTube.

The YouTube algorithm shows videos for viewers with two goals in mind: the right video and something enticing. But recently YouTube search seems to be broken and showing irrelevant recommended videos.

This issue is not just limited to YouTube searches, even on the home page, the users get videos that are completely unrelated to them(1, 2, 3, 4).

It’s so frustrating. The “people also watch” and “you might like this” ruin the search results, suggesting unrelated videos. For example when i searched asmr, weird gross video came up like dead rat rotting timelapse. It’s just ruining yt for me. Source

also when I search for a youtuber, the first few videos are ANOTHER youtuber despite me not searching for him. whats the point of search if it’s just going to be another main page with random videos? Source

In some cases only the first few videos are related but the rest are basically off-topic or non-essential recommended videos.

This isn’t the first time YouTube users are reporting this issue. We came across a report from last year on Reddit describing the same problem. Thus, it seems YouTube is unaware or at least unwilling to fix the problem.

Acknowledgment

Unfortunately, YouTube support hasn’t yet acknowledged this issue. Moreover, there are no good workarounds to fix the issue for now.

The only thing you could try out is use a few different search queries in case you don’t get what you’re looking for in the first shot.

In the meantime, you can also check out our YouTube bug tracker where we have mentioned various bugs and issues affecting YouTube users along with their workarounds, if any.

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