viridian 8 months ago

Just tried, this is weird, not even a direct video title match worked.

For reference, I can confirm that as of around Midnight EST, I was able to pull up the video as the first result, so something changed in that 10 hour span on Youtube's side.

Also searching for any number of things on google.com still gives you the podcast first result.

I am always curious (and inevitably disappointed) about what goes on behind the scenes at the companies with stuff like this. Like, what meetings or policies drive this sort of thing?

  • hulitu 8 months ago

    > Like, what meetings or policies drive this sort of thing?

    A phone call ? /s Corruption is everywhere. Big companies spend a lot a money for lobby, that's why they don't want to upset politicians.

sdeep27 8 months ago

Just tried >joe rogan trump and it was the first result for me

ravenstine 8 months ago

Not surprising. YouTube for a very long time now has quite obviously had a list of keywords that trigger the search results to only return videos from the mainstream media.

EDIT: Go ahead and downvote me, but just know that YouTube behaves this way regardless of political party.

sergiotapia 8 months ago

"It takes effort for a search engine not to be able to find an interview with 34M views between the biggest podcaster in the world and the most famous person in the world."

legitster 8 months ago

While everyone is going to want to jump to some sort of blatant collusion, some points to make:

- The interview got heavily recommended to me via the algorithm

- Search clearly doesn't mind pulling up official clips or even more blatantly right-wing channels

- This has been a known behavior for YouTube search for quite some time

YouTube doesn't reveal much about how their search or their algorithm is designed, but this happens a lot for me when I look for specific videos. My guess is they seem to favor driving people in search to smaller channels, more "family-friendly" clips, less watched videos, and overall better monetized content.

  • viridian 8 months ago

    What I find strange is that I was able to search it last night no problem, but just tried and now I can't.

    It's not the only change that went live today as far as I can tell though, it seems like they are also A/B testing not showing view counts on the home page based on other twitter posts.