Google results for YouTube search

[Hugene]

Not very important for us, but can someone explain to me how Google is not able to produce relevant description text for some queries on Google for content on YouTube? This is just a mind-boggling bug. I have no other way to describe it.

Ex:

Search: "keyword keyword" site:youtube.com

Result:

8 min - 19 Jun 2008 -

Rated 5.0 out of 5.0

YouTube - Category - keyword video name. Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe's Flash Player. ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=[video code]

Basically YouTube is serving Google's bot with this garbage, and they are not doing anything about it. Just weird, or very lazy.

[edited by: tedster at 10:00 pm (utc) on May 1, 2009]
[edit reason] make specific words generic [/edit]

[tedster]

It looks like what SWFObject serves when the the user agent isn't properly js or flash enabled. It vertainly is odd to see it in the search results, since Google owns YouTube.

When I do the search site:youtube.com "Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe's Flash Player" I get "about 28 million results." Since site:youtube.com/watch gives about 114 million total YouTube results, that means about 25% of the indexed YouTube urls are mangled this way.

Funny that I never ran into this in my own searches - I guess I rarely use Google to search YouTube.

[Hugene]

I use Google to search music or videos sometimes and obviously YouTube often pops-up in the resulting SERPS. That bug/problem has been there for as long as I can remember. I don't understand why they don't fix it. Should be simple: they have the code for both googlebot and youtube, and they have access to all the indexes. It just looks very unprofessional.

[Receptional Andy]

Slightly off-topic. I think you need a bit of creative searching when querying Google for lots of content from a large website. The youtube help pages also discuss this no-js error, which should be removed from the search too:

site:youtube.com "JavaScript turned off or" -site:help.youtube.com (I get 78 million results).

If there are less words in the query, you usually get more matches, as this seems to make it less likely to trigger a "too similar" filter and remove pages from the overall count. I try to use as few as possible, while still maintaining query "uniqueness".

In any case, this will affect every youtube video as far as I'm aware, and I think it is youtube's problem. But there's no easy fix - there needs to be a readable message for users with javascript disabled. Where I have run into this problem before, I've cloaked the no-javascript message so it doesn't appear to search bots.

I doubt that would look too great for Google, though, and tweaking results manually for youtube would be a bit of a no-no I reckon ;)

[tedster]

This is really an issue for the Google snippet team more than the crawl team. It's natural for any site to serve the error message, but it's not so good to include that text in the snippet.