Comment by motoxpro
2 years ago
This makes so much sense why people think search results are bad. Great results for "Download youtube videos" is "Ideally, the top hit would be yt-dlp or a thin, graphical, wrapper around yt-dlp"
Just give me a website where I can plug in the DL link and download it to my hard drive. I don't care what package they are using (I don't worry about malware like I did in the 90s). 99.999% of people are not programming tinkerers.
Just makes me realize how subjective search results are. All of their "Great" results are my "Terrible" results.
Malware or well, the actual viruses, in the '90s were a joke, especially because a computer was an isolated thing. Connected computers were the exception.
In the early 90s, yes. By the turn of the century the current industry we see today existed in basic form: malware stole credit cards, compromised PCs were used to send spam as part of botnets, etc. The only major advance was when cryptocurrencies made it much easier to launder money and the professionalism went up accordingly.
The first result on Kagi is exactly this, just tried it a moment ago. It processed and downloaded the video extremely fast. Why would any reasonable person prefer youtube-dl?
IMO, if you're capable of running yt-dlp, it's far better than any website.
It's pretty simple to run these download tools as website, but it's expensive in terms of bandwidth and tends to attract legal attention. So a lot of websites go up supporting it, but even if they were started with good intentions, they will virtually all eventually add intrusive ads or other types of monetization just to break even. So there's never going to be a reliable website for it. If you're lucky, a search engine will send you to one that's working okay right now, but even odds you'll be fighting through a dozen malware nests.
Meanwhile, yt-dlp just works every time, with only an occasional pip upgrade to keep it up to date.
Totally, As the sibling said, it is the same using Google. I am not sure, why anyone would want a programming package to accomplish a task that could be done in < 10 seconds.
But again, I guess that's why search is so hard is because I have to parse that intent from 3 words.
Over here the first result on Kagi is savefrom.net which variously tries to install malware or sell a paid subscription and does not download videos.
It was the same domain for me, but maybe I should have tried it without adblockers? The page downloaded the YT video completely fine for me.
It is the same using Google.