It seems unbelievable to talk about a Google app, but YouTube search has always been improvable; to the point that on many occasions it was better to search for the desired video directly on Google.
Although YouTube has changed to improve video discovery, not all users are convinced. The problem goes beyond the YouTube interface and also affects YouTube’s video recommendation algorithm.
The problem is that this algorithm is also used in video search, and shows videos “related” to the topic what we are looking for, but not exactly this topic. If we search for the name of a “youtuber”, for example, instead of displaying their videos, videos of other similar “youtubers” are displayed.
Improve YouTube Search
Fortunately, there is a very simple method to recover your usual YouTube search, which only shows videos of the word or name we wrote. This trick basically prevents recommendations from showing in search and only search results are shown.
To do this, simply add the following to our search: before: 2025. For example, if we want to search for videos from El Androide Libre, we must write “el androide libre before: 2025”; We can try doing the search normally and adding “before: 2025” to check the difference.
Normal YouTube search results (left) and with the trick (right)
Free Android
The reason this works is because “before:” is a search modifier that indicates that we want videos from before this date to be displayed. Since we have set 2025, all videos must be displayed the same way; but search results with modifiers They do not display recommendations or content unrelated to the search. This is exactly what we want, so that we can take advantage of this “forgetfulness” of YouTube to our advantage and access a simpler but also more direct search.
This also means that next year we will have to change the search to “before: 2026”, and so on every year; but at least we will have cleaner and more precise results. Additionally, “before:” can also be used to search for videos published before a date, such as “Free Android before: 2021”.
This tip went viral on X (Twitter), where many users appreciated that there is a way to prevent the YouTube algorithm from modifying our searches. And there are times when we just want YouTube to show us exactly what we want, without distractions or add-ons.
