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Comment by bambax

2 years ago

I'm in the camp of those who think Google's results are still very good. I admit I use adblock (uBlock Origin) and won't even try to disable it.

I understand the author's point of turning off their ad blocker "to get the non-expert browsing experience" but then they could make a different test with uBlock on for every query and see how it goes.

It's also a bit inconsistent to expect results for downloading videos mentioning yt-dlp while trying to emulate "the non-expert browsing experience"... Yt-dlp is a command-line Python utility. Talk about non-expert! Most people don't know that videos are files that can be downloaded; of those who do, most don't know about the command line or Python.

Yet when searching for "how to download youtube videos" the first result I get on Google is a link to a service called "savefrom.net", which appears to work well and does not seem to be a scam. This would qualify as "very good" in my book.

When searching for "how to download youtube videos from the command line" the first few results are about youtube-dl, including links to github and superuser. Granted they don't mention yt-dlp, but youtube-dl is a good start.

When I do a Google search in an Incognito tab for "how to download youtube videos", the first two results I get are the following.

- https://msunduziassociation.online/perfect-online-videos/

- https://gssaction.org/program-all-in-one-media-solutions/

I would certainly put those in the "Terrible" category like the author.

  • My top 2 (incognito) are blog posts from pcmag.com and zdnet.com listing 5 ways to download YT videos. Maybe it's blogspam, but the listed services seem valid at first glance.

    savefrom.net is the 5th result (2nd page underneath 5 youtube videos)

    Edit: This is from the US. If i had to guess, these are regional differences. What country are you in?

  • I'm curious: what is the rationale for "in an incognito tab" being part of the test harness?

    It seems pretty arbitrary to me to disable one of the key features - in this case personalization - of the software being evaluated.

    Or is the evaluation not between "search engines" but rather "search engines without personalization"? If so, then this restriction does make sense. But that is not the evaluation that "normal users" are interested in.

    • > I'm curious: what is the rationale for "in an incognito tab" being part of the test harness?

      It's the closest we can easily get to the 'average user experience'. Someone who has a long account/cookie history with Google has plausibly trained the site to return more relevant results through implicit user-curation of avoiding obvious-to-them SEO-spam on other queries.

      If we posit that every user eventually trains Google to avoid SEO spam, then this begs the question of why Google(/Bing) don't eliminate the SEO spam in the first place.

      Besides that, it's not obvious why search engine personalization should dramatically change the basic utility of search results. We should expect personalization to mostly address ambiguities: is 'the best way to set up tables' asking about furniture assembly/carpentry or SQL? None of the author's queries for this article supported such ambiguities, and besides that the results returned (see the final appendix) aren't[†] valid answers to a different interpretation of the question.

      [†] -- I think I'd quibble about the 'adblock' question, since a reasonable person might still find an adblocker that works but participates in the 'acceptable ads program' to be sufficient.

      5 replies →

    • Google gets paid when you click on an ad. It's reasonable to guess you're not going to click on too many scam software ads with your software engineer profile. So naturally you'll be showed less of them.

      In this thread we can see people both using incognito tabs seeing different results, it will only become worse to compare if they are using personalized results.

  • I get savefrom.net in both Incognito and normal tabs, uBlock or not. I have no idea why you get crap results that are somehow different. uBlock doesn't change google results in Firefox for me at all. It seems you get crap added, not removed.

    • I searched with Chrome, perhaps that's the difference. Firefox also blocks some ads out-of-the-box even without uBlock, so maybe it was already blocked.

      It could also be related to targeting, like time zone, location, IP address, age group etc.

      1 reply →

  • Did you click either of those links?

    Both seem to do the job of downloading a youtube link to mp4 for free.

    • Did you click either of those links? They are not YouTube video downloaders, they just link to another downloader. There is nowhere on those links to even put a YouTube URL.

      Are you seriously suggesting that a website with the following "About us" with only a link to another YouTube video downloader is itself a good YouTube video downloader?

      > Good Samaritan Support Action is to reawaken the Body of Christ to receiving the extravagant love of The Father, as well as our call to respond to this love by loving God with all of our hearts, souls, strengths, and minds. In order for people’s hearts to be linked to the heart of our Heavenly Father, we want to foster and facilitate the establishment of a culture of love in our churches and ministries.

      2 replies →

cross-posted: Did you try using savefrom.net? You can type "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkYVmtgxebU" into the text box and hit "Download". Then you'll get a new tab that tries to get you to install malware. If you decline to install it, the new tab takes you to the malware's homepage. If you close the tab and go back to the original tab, savefrom.net presents you with an error message saying "The download link not found." and does not help you download the video.

  • savefrom.net used to be good but it seems they've switched their MO. plenty of decent alternatives filled the gap though.

An adblocker is necessary, and IMO a script blocker as well. I feel vaguely like search has gotten worse over time, but it is not a huge problem—usually a good site is on the first page or two, and so I can just go check them out.

But if clicking a site meant I would be under attack, that really increases the stakes, I start to care strongly about the absence of bad sites, not just the existence of a good one.

Other than that, people need to be trained to not download programs from websites in general. I think this has gotten better over time? This is just a human mistake. Maybe Google could suppress sites that link to executables. It must, right?

  • It would suppress linking to malware executables, but just general programs I don't see why they would.

    • By the time you know enough about a site to download some random executable off it and run it, you know more than enough to just enter the URL, so there’s no point to having it show up in search results.

Put me in the camp of google and the rest are horrible for all but very specific/unique technical terms, ie weak neutral currents. Anything that is more "everyday life" is an exercise in futility sorting through trash, often without even the terms you are looking for. And good luck with "verbatim" searches - either ignored or zero results.

> they could make a different test

The takeaway I got from the article is everyone can make their own test, as opposed to relying on other people's sentiments and memes about X is bad or Y is good.

Trying to emulate a non-expert experience without workarounds is not the common usage pattern since everyone familiar with their favorite tools have ways to get more value out of them, but this article presents a way of constructing an experiment (this is why I chose these queries, this is how I ranked scams, etc.), and I think people should follow this same spirit to evaluate if they are stuck in a local optimum with their current choice of tools.

Yeah, author seems to heavily underestimate his own needs vs general needs. But for what Google et al know about me the results could indeed be more precise. I have developed a habit of appending “GitHub” in the search query for when I am actually looking for source code vs just trying to find a page that just downloads me a video.

I'm also in the same camp who think search results from Google is very good but ChatGPT based search with RAG is better, granted it's a paid version. The latter however is kind of experimental, personally would love to have another column on ChatGPT with RAG (Bing) and the fact the author ignored RAG is rather strange.