-YouTube search returns popular completely unrelated content (mostly brainrot) which is clearly feeding to users to watch in case they forgot they were searching for something else

-YouTube search returns unrelated videos that were partially watched

Clearly the youtube search is broken on purpose. It's hard to forget how google search went from good to barely usable and it's hard not to notice how they're applying the same strategy

I've certainly experienced both of these and a lot of the other occurrences people are describing here, but here's what I think is going on in these 2 cases and why. This is based on my own observations actually trying to get videos ranked in search.

Immediately after publishing a search optimized video the main way I measure if I was successful with the technical part of optimization (Title, description, transcript, Text Overlay, keyword density) is to search the exact title to see if my video appears. Immediately after publishing like within minutes, it usually does appear within the first five to ten results.

After the youtube "testing period" if the CTR and AVD (retention) are good, then the views increase from there as the video starts to rank and get tested for more related keywords. And the video certainly continues to rank for the exact title.

If click through and retention are bad in the testing period then the video fails to rank and the video seems to disappear or get pushed way down when searching exact title.

So I believe CTR and AVD maybe factors in YouTube SEO.

After 3-5 results I have noticed that there seems be a segment of long form videos and then shorts actually targeting that casual browse traffic in a search result page! The long form results in those positions are usually weak on technical optimization, only tangentially related or fluffy in terms of delivering on the user's search intent, but from larger channels that are heavily edited, produced and optimized for click through and viewer retention. The kind of hostile user experience that tries to keep people watching for longer with retention editing and by teasing or hyping good info when the user really just needs answers but are easily enticed by better packaging when the first 3 results didn't meet their intent.

I notice the same videos again and again in those positions for a wide range of primary keywords and even the seed keyword, and they get tons of search traffic even though they aren't answering user intent because youtube has realized these videos are effective at converting a laser-focused search user looking for specific information into a casual viewer who is happy to be entertained for a longer period of time when they couldn't find the information they were really looking for.

Let's face it, if the first few results didn't deliver, weren't optimized; then from YouTube's perspective, the user is browsing at that point and it's going to do it's best to retain them.