The odyssey of finding a certain video

— Posted inTechnology, Web development — 2 min read

This is only a short rant about the stupidity of a bunch of search engines that basically all use the same search database.

I knew that I had once seen a video of Brendan Eich (more than a year ago) that dealt with classes in JavaScript, especially ES6 and I wanted to watch it again because I had some hunch that in that video he addressed a problem I have right now.

(Sometimes my brain works in weird ways – I usually don’t remember the things I have watched a long time ago, only that I have and roughly about where I have seen them)

I don’t keep a ginormous history in Vivaldi because I have noticed that too many history results might lead to a slow down of the browser under certain circumstances and especially because all kinds of C**P are stored in the history (e.g. search engine result pages from yesterday – which will definitely not give the same results today), so I had to find that video again. I still knew that I didn’t watch it on YouTube, but somewhere else, so I started a search at the usual non-Google-ish search engines first.

A standard search “classes in javascript ES6” gave almost exclusively YT results (yes, I forgot to add “Brendan Eich” – didn’t remember who gave the talk, could have been Douglas Crockford too, so what?) so I looked up the parameters of my favorite search engines and tried to exclude YT from the results pages by adding some.
(Yes I know that it was still a very unrefined search – but hey – I’ve got results 😉 )

All links to the result pages open in a new tab.

DuckDuckGo:

startpage:

Ecosia:

bing:

And finally I added Google as a “control group”:

I leave the results open to interpretation by you, maybe you get different results, or maybe you can tell me what was wrong with my searches – but I found some search engines lacking.

2 replies on “The odyssey of finding a certain video”

  1. Bing always brings the best results when it comes to videos, I’ve noticed this before.

    DuckDuckGo and StarPage are the most lacking, they only know YouTube and it sucks if you want to search Vimeo or something else. Even more if you don’t know where you saw it, like in your post. Which is a shame as they are the “private” searches.

Comments are closed.