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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

#131

Post by fatneckbeard »

derefr wrote: post #3

I 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 used to imagine similar opportunities with google books. but they have done basically nothing with it. and that's been like 20 years.

if anyone could have disrupted the corrupt and unfair academic publishing world, it was Google. they just found it an uninteresting task. they preferred to work on G+, Stadia, Google Code, etc, https://killedbygoogle.com/

Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline

#132

Post by fatneckbeard »

brookst wrote: post #99
lettergram wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! Google is in the attention business, the more you stay the more they make

Best case for Google is you click through and watch 10 videos without ever finding what you're after, so you try again the next day.

I get it now. It's just like some grocery stores used to operate. They purposely moved stuff around so people have to wander in order to find things. Or they put common items far away so people have to interact with other stuff. Theory is that it increases sales.

Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline

#133

Post by whitemary »

derefr wrote: post #3

I 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…

YouTube profits from people scrubbing videos. Why on Earth would they want to offer full text search instead?

Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline

#134

Post by whitemary »

StrangeATractor wrote: post #115
derefr wrote: post #3

I 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…

Have you tried searching through your call history on a Google phone? It's awful. You'd think they'd have a solid search built in but it's nearly useless. Especially considering you're usually searching for that number you only dialed once and isn't in your contacts and is for some reason excluded from your recents, so you go into your call history (strangely hidden behind a menu) and...there's no search function. WT…

It works as good as Windows search, no better

Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline

#135

Post by crazygringo »

derefr wrote: post #3

I 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…

Google already does this themselves. If you search for rare words (e.g. try "indubitably") it will absolutely pull up videos that have the word in the auto-generated transcript and nowhere else (not in descriptions, not in comments).

Also, using "site:youtube.com" on Google works perfectly for me. If I look up "site:youtube.com david letterman" it gives me the David Letterman channel, followed by a seemingly infinite number of Letterman clips. Precisely what I'd expect.

The only thing I can reproduce that you're complaining about is that Google (and YouTube) search don't seem to index YouTube user comments, in contrast to Reddit. But Google doesn't seem to index comments-attached-to-content anywhere on the internet -- not even comments on articles at mainstream publications like the New York Times. Which is probably more of a feature than a bug -- comments on both YouTube videos and news articles tend to be a lot of emotional reactions and repeated opinions which aren't worth searching at all. In contrast, many (not all) Reddit threads are often very informative and the "main content", so it makes sense Google indexes them.

So I don't really see anything to complain about here, from my perspective.

Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline

#136

Post by philsnow »

dredmorbius wrote: post #125

Does this rely on an API key? There have been earlier tools which permitted command-line / terminal access to Youtube, one of the best being mps-youtube: https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube > That permitted searches for terms and channels (though not subtitle text within channel AFAIK), for music specifically, and compiliation of either temporary or saved playlists, with the option to play through a full selec…

It seems to just use yt-dlp, which supports fetching subtitles.

Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline

#137

Post by gukoff »

cced wrote: post #55
ggerganov wrote: post #14

For videos without subtitles one could chain Whisper to auto-generate transcripts, though that would require downloading the audio and processing it

This is exactly what I’ve built. Nothing fancy just ytdlp + whisper + ripgrep + fzf and I’ve got a pretty interesting way to ctrl+f my YT history.

Mind to share? I'd like to try this out

Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline

#138

Post by gverrilla »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #122
lettergram wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! Google is in the attention business, the more you stay the more they make

> Google is in the attention business This is probably the best description of their business model.

attention abuse would be a better one, imo.

Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline

#139

Post by dredmorbius »

philsnow wrote: post #136
dredmorbius wrote: post #125

Does this rely on an API key? There have been earlier tools which permitted command-line / terminal access to Youtube, one of the best being mps-youtube: https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube > That permitted searches for terms and channels (though not subtitle text within channel AFAIK), for music specifically, and compiliation of either temporary or saved playlists, with the option to play through a full selec…

It seems to just use yt-dlp, which supports fetching subtitles.

Thanks.

Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline

#140

Post by smcleod »

hackernewds wrote: post #70
expertentipp wrote: post #46

I think I'll start to use exclusively CLI tools for discovering and downloading of YT content. The entire experience which starts from typing "youtube.com" in the address bar and pressing enter is obnoxiously unbearable.

Downloading? Do you also not believe creators should be compensated for their content?

I think they should be compensated, but I don't think Google should be.
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