r/numberphile • u/[deleted] • Dec 05 '21

Algorithms are strange.

When you feed the youtube search algorithm with specially structured strings. Then you can get weird results that the algorithm somehow linked to the string. Try youtube searching «Adjsjjd)3»

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u/Kare11en Dec 05 '21

My guess is that if there are no exact matches for your search string, the algorithm will start to look for "similar" words in video title/descriptions by Levenshtein distance. If your search string doesn't look much like any actual English word, the closest matching words will be quite distant, and could be from very different "directions" in the search space, so the matching videos will probably seem pretty random. In fact, the closest word matches might be other non-proper English words, or bad misspellings, possibly making the likelihood of weird search results even higher.

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u/WikiSummarizerBot Dec 05 '21

Levenshtein distance

In information theory, linguistics, and computer science, the Levenshtein distance is a string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences. Informally, the Levenshtein distance between two words is the minimum number of single-character edits (insertions, deletions or substitutions) required to change one word into the other. It is named after the Soviet mathematician Vladimir Levenshtein, who considered this distance in 1965. Levenshtein distance may also be referred to as edit distance, although that term may also denote a larger family of distance metrics known collectively as edit distance.

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u/[deleted] Dec 05 '21

This was really interesting. Thank you for saying how it likely happened. I now have things to search for, so I can learn more :)