I dont know what to think, really.
The Dekaif channel has 434 videos, but YouTube is only showing 275 to clients, whether logged in or not, whether yt-dlp or official access.
This isn’t the first channel I’ve witnessed this, and weirder stuff, on. Another example is this video - “Belt” meme - it is accessible on Grayjay, yet not on YouTube, meaning (I think) that publicly shared videos are being deindexed, and yet they are still hosted.
You used to be able to take the video code from the URL (everything after ‘?v=’ and before ‘&’) and get the exact video in search results. Not now. The second YouTuber, Sparky, has 35 uploads, only 9 of which are visible. And I can attest that at least one of the remaining 26 is hosted, but invisible. I don’t even know how it came up using Grayjay but not YouTube or Revanced.
Basically, there’s a TON of shady underhanded shit happening at YTHQ and everyone needs to jump ship to Odysee, Peertube or some platform that won’t be clogged with AI. This is bad for everyone.
I’m posting it here mainly because I verified my findings with yt-dlp, and this new bs is successfully thwarting my attempts to archive.
3rd Oct edit: I am seeing massive differences in indexed videos versus archived videos. I am currently aggregating but the definitely affected videos range from 10% to 50%
I agree with local search, but I prefer more of a traditional algorithm-based search to generative AI. A solution I’ve seen (that is far more attainable than building your own search engine) is hosting a metasearch engine, which collates results from search engines, based on your own preferences of results. Or perhaps using someone else’s established server if their preferences align with yours. Localised (on-device) search will be a gamechanger in many ways, but I believe a meaningful version of that is far off and potentially impractical to implement.