What I really would like to see on youtube is a full text search on video content, at least for videos with subtitles.
Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
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Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#12I love that a third party is stepping up here, but it's incomprehensible to me that Google doesn't do this themselves. They're a search company, and they own YouTube. The YouTube data — including the subtitle files — is already sitting there on their servers; they don't have to scrape it, they just have to index it. What are they even doing? Fun thing to try: do a Google search with "site:youtube.com" in it. You get…
I would posit that google has determined that it’s more profitable to keep viewers on YouTube via controlling the viewing experience vs whatever additional ad revenue they’d gain by making videos more easily indexable. I’m basing this hypothesis on YouTube’s consistent trend of removing features related to controlling your own viewing experience. For example, removing subscription collections.
Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#13I love that a third party is stepping up here, but it's incomprehensible to me that Google doesn't do this themselves. They're a search company, and they own YouTube. The YouTube data — including the subtitle files — is already sitting there on their servers; they don't have to scrape it, they just have to index it. What are they even doing? Fun thing to try: do a Google search with "site:youtube.com" in it. You get…
There’s a company founded by a friend of mine called MediaDistillery, who are doing awesome stuff in this area. Real-time searchable massive video archives, with contextual understanding (e.g. “a WW2 fragment with a Jewish mother holding her baby”). Super useful for so many purposes. And then there’s YouTube where you can’t even search subtitles. It makes me shake my head. Google seems to be at the forefront of AI, b…
I mustn't be searching it right, I can only get this company: https://mediadistillery.com/ , the feature you mentioned is not accessible, and has that Ad-tech smell.
Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#14For videos without subtitles one could chain Whisper to auto-generate transcripts, though that would require downloading the audio and processing it
Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#15I love that a third party is stepping up here, but it's incomprehensible to me that Google doesn't do this themselves. They're a search company, and they own YouTube. The YouTube data — including the subtitle files — is already sitting there on their servers; they don't have to scrape it, they just have to index it. What are they even doing? Fun thing to try: do a Google search with "site:youtube.com" in it. You get…
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Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#16I love that a third party is stepping up here, but it's incomprehensible to me that Google doesn't do this themselves. They're a search company, and they own YouTube. The YouTube data — including the subtitle files — is already sitting there on their servers; they don't have to scrape it, they just have to index it. What are they even doing? Fun thing to try: do a Google search with "site:youtube.com" in it. You get…
I think you're exaggerating a little when you say "site:youtube.com" doesn't work. If I search 'site:youtube.com apple watch' I get 143 000 000 results, and if I search something more specific like 'site:youtube.com "Featuring Dr James Grime"' I'll find exactly what I'm looking for. But you're correct that it doesn't seem to search video comments, only titles and descriptions.
Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#17Nice work. You could encode the text, load this into a vector database and allow semantic search.
Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#18Nice work. You could encode the text, load this into a vector database and allow semantic search.
Something like this? https://dexa.ai
Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#19What I really would like to see on youtube is a full text search on video content, at least for videos with subtitles.
For what it is worth, we work on a tool[0] to index all local videos and images and later allowing query just using natural language. It is based on CLIP which has been trained on image-text pairs, but seems to work great for videos after applying some naive heuristics.
Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably because YouTube =! Google Search, while YouTube is still a subset of Google. So, going an extra mile for YouTube and not for others might put Google Search in anti competition issues. Then again, I also find it absurd. YouTube is one of the most valuable parts of the Internet. And its lack of searchability is criminal. At least the YT search itself should make up for it. It's shame it doesn't.
Google doesn't necessarily have to do anything special for YouTube, though. Google could "just" index YouTube videos as if they were any other web pages, in a standard way. It would then be YouTube's job, to make the data inside those video pages legible to Google's indexer. Where Google could enable this, by pushing for web standards to increase machine-legibility of video in HTML — e.g. standardized ARIA-accessible…
e.g. standardized ARIA-accessible captions sources for the element, etc.
YouTube could literally be a minimal web forum with a video tag in the first post of each thread, but likely due to DRM and related motivations, they instead wrap everything in thick layers of obfuscated JS.
Comments were easily indexable too, before that was also removed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11053204
For a while there were various shady-looking sites that seemed to scrape YouTube video pages (including comments) and I could sometimes find them through Google (then going back to YouTube for the original video), but within the past few years those have unfortunately also either been delisted/censored from search results or died out.