YouTube's recommendation system connects billions of people around the world to content that uniquely inspires, teaches and entertains. Given that everyone has unique viewing habits, the core job of recommendations is to meet user needs by helping people find the videos that they want to watch and that will give them value.

At the highest level, our recommendations system is designed to anticipate and meet a user's needs to drive value through relevant and satisfying viewing experiences. Understanding a user's viewing behaviour, likes, dislikes, subscriptions and feedback, including from satisfaction surveys, helps us do this most effectively. And just like on Search, we also consider the reputation and the quality of a channel to determine how, when and to whom the content can be surfaced to, and use external evaluators to help us understand how an average viewer might perceive the content to ensure that users have a high-quality experience.

We also know that not everyone wants to always be logged in or to share their information with us, so we've built controls that help people decide how much data they want to provide. Users can always pause, edit or delete their YouTube search and watch history whenever they want.

You can find recommendations at work in two main places on YouTube:

For topics where accuracy and high quality are key — like news, personal finance and medical and scientific information — we elevate high-quality voices using a variety of tools. Here's how it may look:

To provide additional context about certain events, topics and publishers, we use information panels across YouTube, which may look like: