I don't understand your use case. If I know the exact title of the video, it finds it. Everytime.

If you try to describe a non-popular video it just becomes a crapshoot on what to give you if there's no word/tag watching. You'd need some hint of the channel name or something. The volume of low viewership videos is incredibly high.

Can you give me a real example of something you've tried to do?

> If I know the exact title of the video, it finds it. Everytime.

This is unfortunately not true. I have a little channel and there have been times when searching for the exact title of some of my videos did not return it in the results at all (searching with quotes or not). Cannot reproduce now because the search algorithm has now started liking me.

It finds that video, yes. But it also "finds" an unrelated pile of other videos that are not related at all.

Okay so it does work.

Just try any search. A few results, and then google tries to recommend you completely unrelated, popular videos within your search results.

So it becomes "completely useless" when it gives you the correct answer but also recommends some other videos?

When the videos are completely unrelated to your search, but just happen to be new/popular videos, then yes it's useless. Surfacing relevant videos would make sense.

For example, searching for climbing comp videos and getting a completely unrelated video about some new tech gadget released within the last couple days from a random popular content creators makes no sense.

Clearly, it works for Google (content creators intentionally make click-baity thumbnails and titles because Google encourages it), but it's user hostile: it's designed to suck you into a vortex, which is not what the user was intending in the first place.

That said, all content platforms do this right now, so my intention isn't singling out Google. It's frustrating nonetheless.