Irony of Search II

Remember that odd thing I mentioned about search results on YouTube? There’s a fundamental flaw.

I brought up how YouTube provides results, unprompted, for prior and highly specific search queries on the homepage - days after the initial query itself did not satisfy your search.

I did a bit of digging, but unsurprisingly, there’s no information about the inner workings of YouTube’s search algorithm. Also, the bulk of the information I found focused on optimising content for the algorithm.

However, Google has stated that they’ve transitioned from optimising for watch time to optimising for user satisfaction. Watch time is easy to measure. How does one measure user satisfaction without using watch time as a surrogate measure!

But I’d like to infer a possibility from this.

All of YouTube’s recommendations, including search results, are based on the profile they have of the user. The update frequency of these profiles is also not disclosed. However, it is reasonable to assume that it does not happen in real time. Even if it were, the data collected from an abandoned search would not exist to impact the algorithm until the search was, in fact, abandoned.

If an abandoned search is a sign of an unsatisfied user and the data relating to an abandoned search isn’t available until the search is abandoned, this explains the delayed impact on the algorithm and the search results it drives. If we add to that the fact that the user recommendation profiles are likely not updated in real time, this all begins to make sense.

At the risk of stating the obvious, there’s a fundamental problem with this approach. It guarantees that a well-profiled user will leave empty-handed when seeking something new. This is a big issue for someone like me. I want to fix the hinge on this vintage cooler before the weekend. I don’t need 10 cooler hacks that will change my life.