YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers

Yes. The way the default search now works is that, when you search you get:

• Three or four videos that are actually from your search.
• Some recommended playlists.
• The shorts tray that vaguely has some content related to your search.
• Maybe two or three more videos from the actual search.
• "People also watch" recommendations.
• "Shorts for you" recommendations.

If you want to get just your search results, cutting away shorts, playlists, and the recommendations that take up the majority of the search page, you'll have to open up the filters and click on "videos" on the cl tent type list. Then you actually get to see the search results.