Ideas for improving video search?

carl

While Kagi offers much improved video search results compared to YouTube's native offering, the quality is still very lacking. Let's brainstorm how video search quality could be improved, within the capabilities of Kagi.

For an example of a query that yields many low quality results: https://kagi.com/videos?q=cb650+2025

I will list some suggestions below on how to improve video search, and I hope other people have ideas as well, and that the Kagi team can chime in.

If the only thing stopping Kagi from improving video search is cost, then I suggest that you offer a paid add-on for premium video search, whether as a permanent or temporary solution.

In the example above, we see a lot of low quality videos, which are basically still images with AI generated text and AI voice narration. There are no people who want to see these videos.

Suggestion 1: Down-rank videos that are still images or a montage of still images. There are a lot of legitimate uploads on YouTube which are still images, such as music or podcasts. But these do not belong under a "Video" search. Video should be motion pictures.

Suggestion 2: Down-rank videos with emojis in their title. These are universally low quality. Especially target videos with sewage content emoji indicators such as: 😱 and 🔥

Suggestion 3: Down-rank videos with ALL-CAPS titles. These are generally low quality.

Suggestion 4: If possible, look as well into video description to further filter and rank videos.

Suggestion 5: Please give more suggestions!

nobodywasishere

Downranking AI generated videos is something we're experimenting with internally, and something that's a lot harder than the current AI generated image filtering. If you're able to find more queries that surface a lot of AI generated videos, please feel free to share.

RoxyRoxyRoxy

nobodywasishere cute kitten is FULL of AI slop being uploaded seemingly every second.

carl

nobodywasishere

It's quite easy to predict what kind of queries will result in a lot of AI generated videos. For example any query containing "review" will usually do. Here's another one: https://kagi.com/videos?q=mac+studio+review

Or just the query "Mac Studio": https://kagi.com/videos?q=mac+studio

With this gem:

Suggestion 5: Down-rank any channel containing the word "bot"

carl

Also, I think that almost nobody wants to see short videos in their results, so another suggestion is to down rank videos which are less than a certain duration.

nobodywasishere

carl

There are other ones also like (chevy|ford|etc) concept car or <new movie> trailer that I've found that produce a lot of AI generated results. Thanks for giving me more places to look

Also, I think that almost nobody wants to see short videos in their results

I think this is a little too broad. There are other metrics we could use to downrank just for quality and not specifically about AI, like the age of the channel (<1 month or <1 week) or the ratio of subscribers to videos (1000+ videos with <1000 subscribers means the channel may not be the best quality wise).

RoxyRoxyRoxy

I'd like to add that a lot of those downrank criteria should be toggleable if possible- users may have bad taste in the videos they like 😛, but Kagi should be able to respect that they might want to see that sort of content. This would be useful for someone intentionally trying to find AI slop for whatever reason.

nobodywasishere

RoxyRoxyRoxy The AI video filtering would operate the same as the current AI image filtering, with All, None, and Only options.

RoxyRoxyRoxy

nobodywasishere I wonder if the current AI image detection could be applied to video thumbnails and channel pfps and header images? The slop channels often use AI to generate those images.

carl

nobodywasishere

Those are also excellent suggestions, if Kagi can get that kind of access.

I don't think that anybody who is searching for videos wants to have any short form videos in their results. That is the kind of content that people enjoy when they are aimlessly scrolling their feeds, but not when they are actively looking for something.

In theory, there would be useful videos on YouTube giving a very short and correct answer to a question. In practice, those videos aren't there.

RoxyRoxyRoxy

carl I’m gonna disagree on this, I often search for short memes/soundbites/vines (rip) and excluding short videos would very much degrade my search experience.
EDIT: In this case I’d much rather just have expanded duration selection.

nobodywasishere

RoxyRoxyRoxy

Was about to post this example agreeing with you
https://kagi.com/videos?q=road+work+ahead+yeah+i+sure+hope+it+does

We could look into expanding duration selection.

carl

YouTube's own video search is already excellent for finding any memes and such. There are no other alternatives for searching for quality videos.

RoxyRoxyRoxy

carl YouTube doesn’t really have the same incentive alignment that Kagi does so still might be worth looking into.

ak42

why "detecting" ? why not crowd sourcing ? a la sponsor block.

RoxyRoxyRoxy

ak42 Detecting is much better at scale than crowd-sourcing; Sponsorblock has 775k users and Kagi has 42k. This is especially pertinent considering these slop channels kinda by definition flood YouTube to an insane degree.

carl

ak42 I think that new AI channels and AI videos are automatically created on YouTube much faster than any crowd of real humans can keep up.

ak42

haha, didn't realize it was THAT bad.
my usage of freetube is very limited to my "subscription" list and "related" videos.

on a side note: https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/our-approach-to-responsible-ai-innovation/

But as @RoxyRoxyRoxy already said:

YouTube doesn’t really have the same incentive alignment that Kagi does

orb

Starting to see results flood with clear AI content.

See

90 second videos seem to be the target for these, would love to see reduction....

i wonder if there's a way to incorporate YouTube's captions or other metadata to help weight these results and/or red flag.

Feel free to edit/revise as needed, trying to provide as much context.

useful videos about the PS Vita.