I didn't know HOW bad Google search has gotten.

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat⁩ to ⁨mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world⁩

For some reason I was back in Chrome today, and I searched Google, without meaning to, for:

get channel id for a youtube channel

Here’s what I got:

✨ AI Overview Learn more … To find a YouTube channel’s ID, you can: Use the YouTube account settings Sign in to YouTube, select your profile picture, then Settings, and then Advanced settings. You must be signed in as the channel’s primary owner to see this information.

That’s great, but I am not the channel’s primary owner, and surely the majority of the time the person seeking an answer to this question will not be, also.

Use the channel’s URL Click on the channel’s name under any of its videos, and then look at the URL of that page. The handle will appear at the end of the link, preceded by the @ sign.

That is not the channel ID.

Use the page source code View the page source code of any video from the channel, and look for the “channelid” keyword.

I felt a little stingy at this point, because this sounds like a real solution.

I opened the source for the channel page, and searched the source code for channelid, and found nothing.

Then, while typing this complaint, I noticed that I was supposed to do that from a random video’s page, so I opened one of the videos, did that, and found nothing.

A YouTube channel can have multiple URLs that direct viewers to the channel homepage. These URLs can look different, but they all point to the same channel.

Irrelevant information. How do I find the channel ID?

Generative AI is experimental. 👍 👎

Thanks Google! I know.

Sign in to YouTube. Settings . From the left menu, select Advanced settings. You’ll see your channel’s user and channel IDs.

Find your YouTube user & channel IDs - Google Help

Yes! I know. However, this isn’t my channel. I want to find someone else’s channel’s ID.

❓About featured snippets • 💬 Feedback

I have some doubts whether you would accept my feedback, if I decided to give it. Why is this here?

Learn what words mean as you search Select words to get definitions & translations without leaving the page (Got it)

Thanks! That’s really useful to know. Do you know how I can get a channel ID though?

People also ask

How do I get a YouTube Content ID?

Does YouTube have the ID channel?

How do I get my YouTube channel name?

How to find YouTube channel gmail id?

Fascinating!

Stack Overflow stackoverflow.com › questions › how-can-i-get-a… An easy answer is, your YouTube Channel ID is UC + {YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID}. To be sure of your YouTube Channel ID or your YouTube account ID, access the advanced … 23 answers Top answer: To obtain the channel id you can view the source code of the channel page and find … How can I get YouTube channel ID using channel name URL? Feb 7, 2023 Is there any way to get youtube channel ID … - Stack Overflow Sep 14, 2023 How to get a youtube channelid from the channels link … Jan 11, 2023 I can’t get channel id using YouTube Data API v3 Mar 25, 2023 More results from stackoverflow.com

I clicked on Stack Overflow, closed several popups. The top answer wasn’t useful. I did find a couple of answers down:

"To obtain the channel id you can view the source code of the channel page and find either data-channel-external-id=“UCjXfkj5iapKHJrhYfAF9ZGg” or “externalId”:“UCjXfkj5iapKHJrhYfAF9ZGg”.

UCjXfkj5iapKHJrhYfAF9ZGg will be the channel ID you are looking for.

I tried that, and it didn’t work.

Back to Google:

Comment Picker commentpicker.com › Tools › YouTube YouTube Channel ID Finder is a free tool to help you find a YouTube channel ID, along with other related channel information and statistics.

And it worked! I get 2 free channel ID queries per day. Fortunately I only needed the one. But it worked! It only took several minutes of scrolling past multiple screens of things that didn’t work.

Now let’s compare that to DDG.

Videos for get channel id for a youtube channel 1:28 How to Find YouTube Channel ID - 2024 263K views YouTube1yr

I skipped this as I didn’t want a video.

www.streamweasels.com › tools › youtube-channel-id-and-user-id-convertor YouTube Channel ID Finder - YouTube Username to ID Convertor Simply enter any YouTube username or handle below and click Convert Username to ID. This tools makes use of the YouTube API to make the conversion. You can check out our other API tools here. Select YouTube handle, username or legacy: YouTube handles are now considered the default for Y

And there we go! It works.

When did it get this bad?

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Comments

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DirkMcCallahan@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It got bad several years ago, which is when I permanently jumped ship to DDG. It’s nowhere near as good as Google used to be, but on the other hand, it’s also nowhere near as bad as Google is now.

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- Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It especially sucks I still sometimes have to go back to google purely because living in a smal country a lot of stuff yimply cannot be found on ddg.
  
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- Mr_Blott@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’ve been paying for kagi. It’s shit but I’m giving them a fiver a month in the hope it gets better
  
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  - mayo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    kagi
    
    I’ve been trying the trial/100 searches a month. Using very sparingly, but I like how it pulls up actual sites instead of ads disguised as websites.
    
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- njm1314@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I find DuckDuckGo works on Broad General topics, but when you’re trying to get specific it is just completely inadequate. I’ll search for something in the results are nowhere close to what I’m looking for. I’ve been trying to find something better.
  
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Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The AI overview thing is completely full of shit 99% of the time, too.

It’s given me fake URLs, made up information about Google’s own services/support methods, fabricated tutorials for video games, and other insane shit.

Like when I asked if Tsushima was a real place, it just gave a paragraph about the game (Ghost of Tsushima) and said that the game featured real, modern restraunts from Japan such as Narisawa and fast food places like McDonald’s. The game takes place in or close to the feudal period.

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- intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Does anyone know how to turn off the AI overview?
  
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  - MotoAsh@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yes. Stop using Google services.
    
    Why is that the answer? Because Google WANTS you to use it, and it is not illegal to force you once you’re searching with them.
    
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  - dbaner@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Use this...https://udm14.org
    
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- celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Except in this case, the AI overview gave them exactly the correct information. They’re just trying to do something that circumvents Youtube’s TOS and they’re wondering why the owner of Youtube isn’t including that information in search results.
  
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  - alnitak@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Why would finding the id of a YouTube channel be against the tos? It’s used in many api calls to pull info about a channel. An API that is provided by YouTube…
    
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  - Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Where in the TOS does it limit access to a channel’s unique identifier ID? You need that shit for external tools to work.
    
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slazer2au@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
About the same time google started personalising search results.

Then ads in place of search results

Then Seo spam to get top results of those keyword searches.

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- PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Ed Zitron diagnosed the causes and timing of the rot:
  
  www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
  
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  - makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s an incredible, and specific read. Love this.
    
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  - PlasticExistence@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Thank you for that article! He’s a truly good writer, and I read a couple more of his entries before I bookmarked his site.
    
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  - mPony@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    FTA
    
    McKinsey is to the middle class what flesh-eating bacteria is to healthy tissue.
    
    Holy shit, this writer pulls no punches.
    
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Showroom7561@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

When did it get this bad?

Bad? Google just proved that they can get you to stay on their search page (or come back to get a different answer) for way longer than you need… this is a WIN for them.

The enshittification of the internet + the greed inherent in these mega corps have caused websites to be designed to ~~grab~~ steal your attention for as long as possible. The longer they can keep you on their site, the more money/data/attention/time they can get out of you.

If search was designed to benefit the user, a typical visit would result in maybe 5-10 seconds of someone’s time to enter a search and click on the relevant result. You proved that when you compared it to DDG 😀

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- LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah except OP already said they don’t use Google anymore, presumably because they got fed up with it. As the expression goes, pigs get rich and hogs get slaughtered. If Google has bogged down the web search experience so much that people are defecting then they’ve gone too far.
  
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  - Showroom7561@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Believe me, Google does enough a/b testing, and has enough experience in psychological manipulation to know where “the line” is for most people.
    
    Sure, some will never use their product(s) again when pushed too far, but they don’t really need everyone to be using their products.
    
    Only the users they can profit from the most are of value. If a terrible UI, awful UX, or even a paid subscription doesn’t scare them away from using a Google Product, then each of those users becomes a cash cow.
    
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nxn@biglemmowski.win ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t know how much of it is specifically Google making their search engine worse vs the web being flooded with AI generated SEO trash that’s intended to keep you on the page for a few minutes when all you need is a simple one word or one sentence answer.

It’s definitely some mix of both though because I found getting concrete answers a lot simpler a decade or two ago just by using quotes around key phrases in conjunction with what seemed to be actual operator keywords like “OR”. I personally don’t think any of that behaves the same way these days, but I have no concrete proof of this so maybe I’m just imagining things.

I’m slowly coming to terms that the web portion of the internet is a lost cause as AI, bots, and bad actors infiltrate and abuse more and more of it.

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WrenFeather@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Is there any way to turn off the garbage-tier AI in Google searches?

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- dbaner@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  udm14.org
  
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  - LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You can also add an extension for firefox/ ff mobile. Search for udm14 and you’ll find it. Keep in mind this also kills things that are more useful like sports schedules, calculator, time in different cities etc. that Google does automatically. So if I want that I just open an incognito tab to bypass the extension.
    
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- ReluctantZen@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Startpage is basically a different frontend for Google and doesn’t have this
  
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atrielienz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Part of the problem is that Google nowe defaults to “All” (web, shopping, news, video, etc) instead of defaulting to Web only and allowing you to select if you want video, or shopping or news etc. That’s a lot of what I see complained about most.

This is first and foremost because Google is an ad aggregation company and they literally want to keep you on the page longer to serve you more ads.

The second problem is that the SEO for Google is so abused at this point that it’s laughable. Search engine optimisation was useful until companies and people started trying to hack it in order to have their results show up before competitors. Because large competitors also have money, it’s no longer enough to just pay to play.

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- BigDiction@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Feel free to correct me as I see other comments saying the same thing, but I don’t believe Google wants you to spend a lot of time reviewing a specific search result.
  
  They don’t have refreshing display or video ads where time on site really makes a difference. They want you to click on a sponsored result, which is a paid action worth way more than a viewed impression.
  
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  - atrielienz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The more you scroll, the more ads they can serve on one page. So if you scroll to the bottom, don’t see the results you want, you’re likely to try to reword what you were searching for which will bring up new results and more ads. When you think about the fact that 4-5 of the first results are ads generally (if not more) and you have to scroll past those to get a result that isn’t an ad, you recognize that they are maximizing time spent looking at ads because that’s what they are selling to their real customers (the ad services for whom they aggregate).
    
    This scenario makes it more likely that you will click on a sponsored result, backtrack, scroll some more, not see what you’re looking for, re-word your search query, click on maybe another sponsored result, backtrack etc.
    
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foggy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think it’s most evident when you do something like search “(venue name) Events”

Where you would normally get the venues events page as a top hit, Google tries to get you to get that info without ever visiting their page via a card.

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Tyoda@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I had to go hunting for channel IDs when I ditched the yt frontend for RSS. There is still proper working RSS for each channel, even though for some reason they removed the actual RSS button probably a decade ago.

So I had to go to the channel page, inspect element, search for “rss”, and somewhere in the page source there would be the link (or I might have to refresh sometimes because it’s missing for whatever reason). One only needs the ID, as the rest of the link is the same, of course.

As we both found out, it’s not as trivial as it once may have been, before @s.

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brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Wait until they put ads into the AI search results.

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- makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s going to destroy so many businesses. Imagine when only one software company can afford that ad? Or one real estate agent. Or one shoe repairer. It’s a literal budding war for the one and only answer / result. It’s despicable.
  
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  - brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    They’ll probably mix it up, and randomize the results of different categories… I guess?
    
    But the last thing AI search needs is spam.
    
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AtomicHotSauce@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
My issue is that, every time I try to use DDG or something else, I can’t find the answers I’m looking for almost without exception, so I end up going back to a google search, where I usually do find what I’m seeking. Are there ANY viable alternatives?

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- baggachipz@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Kagi is the real deal, but it costs money. You get what you pay for.
  
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  - fleet@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I made the switch recently. I love it but do wish it was a fair bit cheaper.
    
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- AlecSadler@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’ve been using Kagi since February and it’s been superb. I typically find what I need in the first 5 results and the ability to customize it is really nice.
  
  It costs a little money, but honestly it’s saved me so much time over the 12,000 or so searches I’ve conducted that it’s worth it. Previously I’d sometimes have to hit up some combination of Google, Bing, DDG, Brave, etc. just to get somewhere.
  
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- a_wild_mimic_appears@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  i switched to a SearXNG instance a while ago and i am pretty happy with it!
  
  look at searx.space to find one with a good response time for you and try out if theres something yeo like :-)
  
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  - xonigo@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yes SearXNG is awesome. You can even self host your own instance for added security/privacy. I have my own instance running on a free tier Oracle cloud 1core/1GB ram and it works great.
    
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- Klaymore@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I use Ecosia (which uses Bing results) and it seems decent, although I haven’t used Google or DDG in a while so I can’t compare.
  
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kylian0087@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yeah i started to notice this as well. Also a ton of nsfw stuff nowadays seems to not show up anymore. Ducksuckgo is even worse through. For what ever reason Yandex gets better results then google and duckduckgo. Not a fan of yandex in general though.

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Donut@leminal.space ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m with you but I wouldn’t trust search results that point me to a 3rd party tool to do whatever I need to do. Unless the link in question is actually well known and I’ve just been living under a rock, then don’t mind me

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RedStrider@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
my conspiracy is they added an ai that reinterprets what you search to combat seo, but it backfired and now google just gives you the wrong answer

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celsiustimeline@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Well, you’re searching for something that is inherently against Youtube’s TOS. You’re not supposed to be able to see channel ID’s for channels you don’t own. This isn’t Google Search’s deficit, it’s you looking for something that doesn’t have any relevance to anyone except a channel owner. You can’t do anything with someone else’s channel ID.

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- PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I am fetching the RSS feeds for particular channels, for which I need the channel ID.
  
  Google gives out not only the RSS feed, but also the channel ID, if you click the menu under “share”, as someone else pointed out to me a couple days ago. You are very confused about things. This thing about it being against the TOS is pure fantasy.
  
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possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You should ask it for medical advise

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Boris_NotTooBadinoff@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
YtTags is another useful tool

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dariusj18@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Umm, or just go to the youtube channel, click the more link on the description, click “share channe” buttonl and click “copy channel id”

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Mwa@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
after calling google a great search engine dude and google goes mr krabs mode

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Boozilla@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
View source worked for me, but there’s a couple of tricks to it I think…maybe.

First I made sure I was on the channel’s main page and not one of the channel’s videos. Then I did right-click “view source”. The source is all smashed together (unformatted) of course. It’s annoying to search and read like that, so I copy-pasted the source into my favorite text editor and was able to find “channelid” it that way.

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sanguinepar@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Not sure if this will help for that specific search but I recently discovered a change that you can make to your browser’s search defaults that makes Google search a lot better (for me at least)

Details in this thread: lemmy.world/post/19104187

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- Thorry84@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  TLDR: Add &udm=14 to the Google search URL.
  
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  - sanguinepar@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yep, and thanks, I should have done that myself. Although setting that up as the default search takes a little more detail.
    
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