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Above note is the reason Google can't recommend you anything.

Consider momentarily the amount of data processing necessary to somehow recommend a relevant video from:

  ~14,000,000,000 videos on Youtube
  615 seconds (~10 minutes) mean length.
Which works out to:

  8,610,000,000,000 seconds
  143,500,000,000 minutes
  2,391,666,666 hours
  3,274,083 months
  272,840 years
  27,284 decades
  2,728 centuries
  273 millennia
Netflix simply attempting to provide somewhat relevant recommendations was a massive data crunching effort years ago, and even that was "only" the official movies and television of humanity. Data take from a previous post I made 9 months ago [1] and from this article [2] and this paper on Youtube data statistics [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39421041

[2] "What We Discovered on ‘Deep YouTube’", https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/how-m...

[3] "Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube", https://journalqd.org/article/view/4066/3766



Underrated reason for tiktok's success: shorter videos lend themselves way better to recommendation algorithms, because you have better data about what users want to see


Almost all my recommended videos have tens of thousands of views or more. I don't know for sure if the algorithm usually ignores 97% of videos, but it might as well be doing that. Doing that vastly reduces the number of options and means you have lots and lots of data for each video.


It can't be that hard, once you develop a profile for a user, you just need to classify the incoming videos and cross reference their profile against the classifications.


I think that “just” might be doing some heavy lifting in that assertion.


Sure and classifying video is one of the classically hard things for computers to do. Really classifying in general.




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