> This drives me insane. For some searches, you're not going to find anything near what you're looking for if YouTube decides that their "personalized" search results will be better.

Yup. YouTube search is essentially entirely worthless. The purpose of the search bar isn't "show the user want they want to find," it's "show the user the videos that will make us the most money."

Amazon does the same thing, but with product search results.

For both of these, I never end up using the built-in search engine, I always go to an external search engine like DuckDuckGo or Bing. Which have their own problems of course, the least of which is that they generally only index YouTube, but there is no other decent alternative.

> especially when it actively decreased my engagement.

Agreed, but it's likely that you and I are in the tiny, tiny minority. Most of the people who use the YouTube search function are looking for entertainment, not content related to specific interests, tutorials, or information. See the top search queries for YouTube over the last year, basically ALL of them are to do with music, movies/tv, and video games: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?gprop=youtube