For April Fools Sega released an (actual, real) “Sanic the Hedgeheg” t-shirt and I wanted to see if there was anything about it on YouTube. YouTube assumed I meant “sonic” and it was impossible to correct it and say “no I’m actually searching for this dumb meme”. It just assumes everyone who uses YouTube is really dumb I guess. (I bought the shirt by the way and am excited to get it lol)

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QuantumNomad_ 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was curious after reading your comment and searched for sanic meme tshirt in the YouTube app. One result looked highly relevant, posted 4 days ago. It was a short, not a normal video mind you. Titled Official “Sanic” merchandise and having a picture of sanic and some dude’s face. Most of the rest of the results were from different dates, several ranging to years ago. But a lot of those other ones seemed to be about meme sanic as well at least.

I didn’t click on any of them to verify, lest YouTube decides that it should replace my whole YouTube home page with sonic fandom and sanic memes :P

	▲	john01dav an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I just put this into YouTube search and got results that contraindicate your claim¹: > "sanic" the hedgehog The quotes seem to shut down autocorrect 1: there's nothing that I see about the T-shirt, but the first result is titled "Sanic DA hedgeh0g". I will not be looking at what this video is. Several other results also include the word "sanic" in relation to the hedgehog.

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byte_0 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is exactly the type of criteria that WhatsApp search struggles with. It basically assumes the user does not know how to type.

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msephton 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Just put the term in quotes "sanic the hedgeheg" ignore the suggestions and press enter to see the real results.

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thfuran 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Google no longer cares much about quotes. Sometimes it’ll take them seriously and sometimes not.

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lelandfe 2 hours ago | parent [-]

For instance, searching the quoted (random phrase) "pants butler" produces first page results like:

"pants,” Butler" and "pants...Butler" and "Pants - Butler's"

Second page loses it entirely, with results like "BUTLER SVC Green Back Country Cargo Pants" and another that seemingly lacks "butler" anywhere on the page.

	▲	iamnothere an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I have also noticed this. Many other search engines have started doing it too. If I had to guess, they are probably deferring to autocorrect if a quoted search doesn’t appear often enough to be notable and the distance to existing common tokens is small. This really sucks, because it means that you can’t search for uncommon things that are named similarly to common terms. Once upon a time it wasn’t like this. A similar problem comes up if you want to clarify a common search with an uncommon term, like (made up example here) “German castle Tokyo”. Once upon a time you could quote the uncommon term or prefix it with a plus to force a narrowing of the results. This could find discussions or specific posts with unusual combinations of words, which was great when you knew were looking for something very specific and obscure. Now this hardly ever works, and instead they just ignore your extra term. Sometimes the search engine “AI assistants” can find these things if you prompt correctly, which is maybe the most useful application of AI that I’ve found. But even then they often don’t seem to search that deeply, and often they will just assume that your query is invalid and gaslight you.