What feedback mechanism would you use to filter the crap? There is no longer an incentive for users to down-vote (assuming you managed to even get that data). And such a search engine needs a literal army of users providing signal to evaluate the quality of content as it is released.
Backlinks linking to the video on the web, number of views, likes, comments, NLP analysis of the title and the description of the video and yea references made to each video in other video descriptions is also good idea.
It's an interesting idea. But my gut feel is that only a minority of content actually is referenced elsewhere. It would be an interesting idea to test though!
> There is no longer an incentive for users to down-vote
I don't get that. It should have the exact same incentive to down-vote, unless you think Google no longer collects or uses that information as opposed to just hiding it.
People respond to feedback mechanisms. If you hid comments on videos, do you think people would be as inclined to add their own comments as much when it is literally going into the void?
Previously, disliking would increment the global "dislike" counter and users got immediate visual feedback that their dislike was counted, even if that state may take minutes for Google to reconcile and store.
Now, clicking the dislike doesn't do much and users have no indication whether others disliked the content too.
