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How a Computer That 'Drunk Dials' Videos is Exposing YouTube's Secrets
An anonymous reader shares a report: How many YouTube videos are there? What are they about? What languages do YouTubers speak? As of 14 February 2025, the platform's will have been running for 20 years. That is a lot of video. Yet we have no idea just how many there really are. Google knows the ans...
For all practical purposes, one of the most powerful communication systems ever created -- a tool that provides a third of the world's population with information and ideas -- is operating in the dark. In part that's because there's no easy way to get a random sampling of videos, according to Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the US. A few years ago, however, Zuckerman and his team of researchers came up with a solution: they designed a computer program that pulls up YouTube videos at random, trying billions of URLs at a time.
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