Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos

Hey HN! I just launched VideoMentions Search, a free tool that allows you to search YouTube to find videos that contain specific spoken words.

Here's how to quickly try it out -

Let's say you want to find every video on The Verge's YouTube channel within the last several months in which "MacBook Pro" is mentioned. Here's a pre-populated search to accomplish that:

https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A%252F%...

If you follow that ^ link, then click the button to perform the search, you'll see all matching videos, with every single mention of "MacBook Pro" highlighted.

My favorite part is that all the highlighted matches are timestamped. So you can click on any of them to jump to that exact moment in the video when that keyword was said!

VideoMentions Search is great for these scenarios:

- You want to find all videos within a YouTube channel that mention your brand, your product, or the topics you care about.

- You remember watching a video where a certain topic was discussed, and now you're trying to remember which video it was to rewatch it.

- You run your own YouTube channel and want to quickly find the exact moments in your videos where you cover certain topics, so you can link others to that content.

I have wanted a way to search YouTube based on spoken words for a while. I couldn't find a tool that provides that capability though, so I built it!

I hope you find VideoMentions Search useful! I'd love to hear any feedback you have on it. Please let me know!

I'm assuming it's using the API to download captions and scanning them, which is why it'd need the Channel. It would be so hard to know where to begin without it!

Potentially future updates could search a logged in user's history?

> - You remember watching a video where a certain topic was discussed, and now you're trying to remember which video it was to rewatch it.

But I need to remember which channel I watched? Maybe I'm missing something, but in my eyes it would make it tremendously more useful if I didn't have to specify channel.

One of the consequences of the effectiveness of click-bait titles on youtube is that searching for videos you watched historically is extremely difficult, because quite often the primary thing in the video is never mentioned in the title. The descriptions are almost universally used to store common links that are about the channel not the video and the consequence of this is that click-bait titled content is very hard to find after the fact. The other problem is quite a lot of channels are testing one title and then changing to another, the video wont then be found using the initial title and so even if you do remember elements of the title the channel may have made that impossible to use some hours or days later as another title with better performance was used.

I can see a need for search in the contents of the videos but I don't want to specify the channel, I likely don't know especially since channels can also change their name.

YouTube doesn't provide a way to search all of YouTube based on the spoken words in videos, unfortunately.

I could update VideoMentions Search to allow users to select multiple channels, and then perform the search across all of those. Like maybe maybe auto-importing all the channels they're subscribed to could be useful. One way or another though, it would still require selecting specific channels to search within. For this first iteration, I just kept things simple with a single channel URL input. Despite that limitation, I still think it's a useful tool, though; I plan to use it often myself.

Thanks for checking it out!