Dear YouTube:

There's so much about you to love. From Tay Zonday to Samwell to He Man Sings to Liam Kyle Sullivan to Barats and Bereta (that's their newest video on the right) to Eepy Bird to the Numa Numa kid to Chad Vader to, um, stuff like this, you have given me hours upon hours of entertainment since your launch in February of 2005. I've spent countless nights staying up until four in the morning watching viral videos when I knew damn well I needed to be up early in the morning. I link to you almost every day on Phillyist.

But that's where I've got a bone to pick with you, YouTube. Because the other day, when going to do my daily search for Philadelphia-related videos, I noticed something. You changed your search feature, and you changed it for the worst. No longer can I sort videos by date, or by the number of times they've been viewed. Instead, while a simple search does what it always did and gives me the most popular videos for my search terms, I have only the options of seeing videos uploaded today, this week, this month, or since the inception of YouTube. It would be one thing if, after selecting those options, we could then at least see their upload dates chronologically (which would make sense), but no: the monthly search for "Philadelphia," for instance, starts with a video that's two weeks old, then two videos from three days ago are followed by a video from six days ago, which is followed by two videos from one and two weeks ago, respectively. The viewing numbers yo-yo from over six thousand to barely two hundred and back to four thousand. The only order that they follow is, apparently, their rating – and even that seems to be less-than consistent.

I'm not being selfish in this. People rely on YouTube to be, among other things, timely. Sure when I'm posting videos, I want the most freshly-uploaded ones possible, but it goes beyond that: people use YouTube to get footage of breaking news stories that, sometimes, haven't made it to the news yet. About once a month, you'll hear stories about citizen journalists being on the scene of a crime/special event/natural disaster before the press gets there. Once in a while, the press can't get there, or can't update with a great deal of regularity, and so we want to be able to refresh our YouTube searches to see what's been uploaded the most recently. You used to be able to search by date and find videos that were uploaded four minutes ago – now you have to weed through irrelevant or updated crap to get to what you really want.

On the flip side, not being able to search by date also keeps you from going to see the oldest video that meets your search requirements. Say you're looking for that David Blaine Street Magic parody, but you want to make sure you watch the original video, not someone's pirated copy to (a) give credit (and hits) where credit is due, and (b) decrease the likelihood that you'll be watching the video with the URL of a free ringtone downloads page superimposed over it. Unless you know the name of the member who first uploaded the video, you really have no way of finding the first copy unless you can search by date and then go to the oldest entry. The new search system actually makes it harder to track down people who've ripped off other users' material, and that's not fair to the people who create the videos the first time around. With terms like "intellectual property" flying around the internets fast and loose, you'd think you'd want to be more careful about these things, not less.

It's not that all of your improvements are bad, and it's really awesome that you'll be letting people upload live video soon (although Viddler did it first). But this change is a giant step backward for you, calling to mind the days when search engines didn't filter out irrelevant or duplicate sites, and news searches couldn't be separated from web searches at all. It's so 1.0, and that's not like you at all, YouTube. You disappoint me.