What I really would like to see on youtube is a full text search on video content, at least for videos with subtitles.
Youglish [1] is a website that allow you to search video with timestamp by transcript text
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
#62I 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…
Beyond conspiracy theories it's interesting to speculate why Google is not providing native search-in-subtitles and search-in-comments. The easiest explanation is that they don't trust the quality. They probably tried it and reached the conclusion that it doesn't improve search in any meaningful direction. I know from experience that search in user reviews is very hard. Unless you really understand the review (which…
I’m pretty sure google uses the captions in search. As long as you search from within YouTube. I regularly search for keywords and find hourlong videos where it’s mentioned somewhere in the middle and nowhere in the description.
Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#63$ python yt_fts.py download 'https://www.youtube.com/@ycombinator/videos' [...] File "/app/yt_fts.py", line 176, in get_channel_id channel_id = re.search('channelId":"(.{24})"', html).group(1) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group' $ python yt_fts.py download 'https://www.youtube.com/@ycombinator/videos' --channel-id UCj089h5WsDdh1q8t54K3ZCw [...] File…
This tool itself does works great.
This behavior is due to the YouTube cookies consent page.
I opened an issue about this specific issue: https://github.com/NotJoeMartinez/yt-fts/issues/1
Glad if you want to help.
Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#64[dead]
Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How would making videos more indexible move people off of YouTube? Once you're there, you'd stay there, with all the current recommender algorithms still in effect; all the external indexability would do is give Google (and Bing, and everyone else) more reasons to lead you into that labyrinth.
I can imagine that training people to snipe the exact content they want based on external search could reduced minutes watched.
If I was searching for how to replace part X in appliance Y or car Z, better search might get me the answer with less watch time. That’s good for me, but might hurt YT.
Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#66I 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 doesn't have to be good. It just needs to do the minimum it needs to keep users from switching to a different platform... which, because of the network effect of so many people and videos being on it, is not much at all. If they had serious competition, they'd have to do more to keep users, but no such competition exists.
There’s twitch and I think Rumble is going to give it a run for it’s money.
I grant Rumble is only 1% the size of YouTube by viewership, but I think that’ll shift fairly rapidly and we can see 10% on rumble in 3 years.
My analysis https://austingwalters.com/an-analysis-on-rumble-nasdaq-rum/
Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#67I 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.
Actually, letting people search video text would enable less watching and that is probably the reason they aren't interested in it.
Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would making videos more indexible move people off of YouTube? Once you're there, you'd stay there, with all the current recommender algorithms still in effect; all the external indexability would do is give Google (and Bing, and everyone else) more reasons to lead you into that labyrinth.
The same way they did a few weeks ago, when they changed the interface to only show you the options "Latest" and "Popular" for a channel, instead of the drop down box that was present before. You could get a list of most recent or older videos. They are about keeping you engaged and keep suggesting to users what they think will keep you engaged with the platform. It's an entertainment platform not a library...
I don’t understand, can you explain more?
Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Actually, letting people search video text would enable less watching and that is probably the reason they aren't interested in it.
Exactly! Google is in the attention business, the more you stay the more they make
Re: Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
#70I 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?