It turns out there is a multitude of ways in which the YouTube search function makes it very difficult to retrieve truly random results. The challenge is that the sample needs to be very random in order to properly rank a video and YouTube doesn’t appear to provide a way to obtain large numbers of random video IDs.Įven if you search on YouTube for a random string, the set of results that will be returned will still be based on popularity, so if you’re using this approach to build up your sample, you’re already in trouble.
Anyway, in order to figure out how popular any one video is, you need a pretty large sample of videos to rank it against. There are probably sites that do this by now, but there wasn’t when we started out. The original idea for this site actually stemmed from another idea to provide a way of benchmarking the popularity of a video against the general population of YouTube videos.
This site provides links to random videos hosted at YouTube, with the emphasis on random.
