Why is YouTube adding “&pp=sAQA” to video URLs?
YouTube started adding a new parameter "pp=sAQA" to video URLs on most index style pages (e.g. /feed/subscriptions, search results, the /videos page on any channel). The actual video pages (/watch) strip the pp= parameter, and it doesn't appear to be added to the URLs for the "recommended" videos.
Does anybody know what this parameter does and/or why it was added? It's really annoying; using YouTube URLs in the shell now requires quoting due to the "&".
It's fairly annoying for other reasons than just shell quoting. For instance, I use the browser history to know whether I've already watched some video; this extra parameter makes all these video links appear to be unvisited to the browser (since back when I visited them, that useless extra parameter didn't exist).
So YouTube is setting environment variables for people who don't do shell quoting. Next they can add "&reboot" to all their URLs.
From the source the pp is - "playerParams":"sAQA"
Maybe it's A/B testing? if so, I'm in the same "sAQA" bucket ...
Stripping is nice an all but I want a plugin or greasemonkey script to rewrite that to pp=random on every request.
I'm seeing them on the home page, channels, explore, subscriptions but not on searches and 'related videos' while viewing one.
/edited for fullness
Sounds to me like a side effect of an A/B test.
That gives a plausible cause to my suspicion that I'm seeing a bunch of stuff I already watched showing up in suggestions again.
Seems like it's being appended to video links shown on youtube that are not from either search results or related videos.
I suspect this is a way for them to exclude click metrics, etc. from videos that were not shown as a result of machine learning/lexical analysis/whatever.
I'm sure they've been identifying how videos propagate since forever, but my guess is that they recently decided it would be efficient to add some cryptic-looking parameter (that probably just corresponds to a boolean) to all video links shown on channels, the home page, etc.
atob("sAQA") = "°\u0004\u0000"
Although not happening for me
Why don’t we have better magic in shells for quoting pasted urls?
Not sure if its something related, I got a wikipedia link from someone which included `&wprov=sfti1` as query string as well.