It's kind of weird that Youtube search continues to be as bad it is. I honestly don't get it.

When video first became popular, I got it. Scrapers had very little to go on: title, channel, tags (later), description, likes, dislikes (saldy, no more). There's only so much you can do with that.

But times have changed. You can (within limits) link videos within videos. Google of course also has the entire Web to analyze links to videos.

And then a decade or so ago we started to get automated transcripts, at which point search really should be getting on par with text-based search. Now? You have any number of LLMs you could develop to gather features from videos or could construct higher context than a pure word search.

Also, Google's personalized search should be able to work well for videos. What category does it fit in? What demographics like it? Do people like you like it?

I don't get it.

Ok, as for the tool, does it work with "norms" of Google search? Do you really need boxes for "exact phrase" and "exclude" when you have double quotes and the hypen (respectively) for both of those things? Likewise do "from" and "to" type searches (a la Gmail) work? I ask because a single search box has definite advantages and you can keep adding search criteria as you see fit.

In an ideal world, I'd also like to be able to search for videos I watched and I liked (eg "is:liked", "is:watched") and search channel categories or labels.