Besides belonging to the same parent group of companies Alphabet
Inc., YouTube and Google search have in common the gigantic numbers they deal
with, they show us and let us interact with every day.
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Examples. According to quora.com, there are now some 14 billion
hours of video on YouTube. About 3 million videos are uploaded every day that
passes. Searching the words “singer Adele” on Google’s engine returns 116 million
results (in 0.8 seconds!).
Apart from being impressive, what do these large numbers really
tell us?
If I were to compare the number of the really helpful, interesting, pleasant and good YouTube videos to the number of what I call “time-wasters”, the ratio would be 1 to 50. This is an opinion, based on personal experience.
I frequently use both platforms and web tools. Like all of us, I do
it for personal reasons, for pleasure as well as for my work. I cannot count
the times when a YouTube tutorial helped me understand a subject, learn new
ways of doing things, or has simply shown me “how to…”. Not to mention listening
to music or watching videos, of course.
However, the number of instance where it wasted my time with videos
that were poorly done or completely wrong is significantly greater. The range
of flaws and imperfections is wide and includes poor sound and/or image, sloppy
form and design, irrelevant contents, unintelligible speech or language accent,
etc.
If I were to compare the number of the really helpful, interesting,
pleasant and good YouTube videos to the number of what I call “time-wasters”,
the ratio would be 1 to 50. This is an opinion, based on personal experience.
Time is particularly wasted on videos that take two or three
minutes to watch before you realize that this is not what you want.
The patterns, and the frustration, are somewhat similar to those Google
search, though there are important differences between them. Because the search
engine starts by returning text results and not videos, it is easier and faster
to filter out what is unwanted, what is irrelevant. For example, I always skip
results that quite fairly start with the letters AD in bold (advertising), and
I just have to read the first couple of lines to have an idea if the result is
worth clicking and exploring deeper or not.
In YouTube, I have learnt to play videos at double speed (a nice
feature offered by the platform) first, to save time, until I decide that it is
indeed what I was looking for.
Jakob Bernoulli (1655-1705) was a Swiss mathematician who is known,
among others, for his Law of Large Numbers (LLN). It states that “as a sample
size grows, its mean gets closer to the average of the whole population”.
Translated and applied to YouTube and Google search engine, it is
easy to understand what the quality of the “average” YouTube video or Google
search result may be.
For instance, the most watched YouTube video to date is “Baby
Shark”, with a flabbergasting 10 billion views, whereas the adagio part of the
“Concerto de Aranjuez” by Joaquin Rodrigo gets 30 million. In theaters all over
the world, the concerto is the most played classical composition of the twentieth
century, along with Bizet’s opera Carmen.
Time is particularly wasted on videos that take two or three minutes to watch before you realize that this is not what you want.
With a little experience, that most of us have acquired by now, it
is possible to optimize the results and to avoid to a certain extent the
useless, the unrelated and the unpleasant, be it on YouTube or when doing a
Google search. In a way it is like looking at an email and understanding
quickly that it is spam; the brain and the eye get trained to determine what
messages are legitimate and what are not.
Would the above deter me from using YouTube and Google search? Not
at all, of course. Life without them would not be the same. There is no going
back. Even if I must browse through 50 videos to find the one that I want and
need, it is still worth the trouble in the end. Besides, the negative aspect of
Bernoulli’s LLN can be felt in countless other fields today. The music industry
itself is producing and releasing a large quantity of new songs every day and
only a very small percentage – perhaps as little as one percent – becomes successful
and can be called good music. Again, just an opinion.
The Writer is a computer engineer and a classically trained pianist and guitarist. He has been regularly writing IT articles, reviewing music albums, and covering concerts for more than 30 years.
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