This has gotten on my nerves a ton as of recent. Trying to search your watch history on YouTube is absolutely fucking infuriating. You can type in like 90% of a video title verbatim, and YouTube will have no idea what you want, but show the same video when you type some random word from the title? I mean fucking seriously? I was looking for a specific video about the history of smash bros, and I shit you not, searching “super smash bros” turned up more than twice the amount of results as searching just “smash”? I mean fucking what? Surely every video that matches the first search would, by definition, also meet the second in any sane universe, no? It’s even worse when you realize that YouTube already has a search capable of looking through the much larger dataset of all the videos when you just search on the site, and Google has an actual fucking search engine, but searching in your watch history is like trying to get directions from a drunken amnesiac? And to top it all off, I can’t even find the video I want because YouTube ruined the actual fucking search by polluting it with literally and intentionally irrelevant garbage after like 4 results
I spent 2 months looking for a music video I swear I’d watched. YouTube’s watch history did not help at all, not to mention it would sometimes break while scrolling so I couldn’t get that far.
I finally found it by exporting my Google Takeout data, selecting only YouTube data, and then loading the watch history file in a text editor and searching for things like “music video” and “official video”. I found it in about 2 minutes.
With the amount of “recommendation” they are shoving into our face I wouldn’t be surprised they intentionally neglected the history search function because they want you to watch new stuff, preferably the garbage they are pushing to you.
And to top it all off, I can’t even find the video I want because YouTube ruined the actual fucking search by polluting it with literally and intentionally irrelevant garbage after like 4 results
Their intention can’t get more obvious that that, isn’t it?
Youtube’s watch history search is weird. I need to type the exact title or it wouldn’t show up, meanwhile the other search bar is much more flexible.
YouTube ruined the actual fucking search by polluting it with literally and intentionally irrelevant garbage after like 4 results
I use Piped for that. It could return all result without adding the barely-related videos. https://piped.video is the official instance. There are also other instances.
Download every video that you think is worth watching again with yt-dlp. Youtube is dying a slow, painful death right now. Probably a topic for another thread, but I believe Google will as well.
