How TikTok and YouTube decide what you see next
Candidate generation: how a video feed finds a few hundred videos among millions
A video app has millions of videos. It has a fraction of a second to pick your next one. It cannot score every video, one by one, in that time. So where does it start?
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The recommender picks your next video in two steps. The first one is quick and rough: out of millions of videos, it keeps only a few hundred.
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It has to be fast: YouTube's 2016 system gave this step tens of milliseconds, less than a blink. So which few hundred, and how does it find them that fast?
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