Search is intentionally bad. You can search for something very generic where there should be millions of videos but only get about one page worth before it pushes shorts and other unrelated algo driven content.
Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters
81–90 of 213 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I still can’t believe they don’t let you search videos within a channel for example. Uh, yeah, they do. https://www.youtube.com/@PuddleOfMuddTV/search?query=blurry > Or search within transcripts. Yeah, I also wish this were possible using the normal CTRL+F just doesn't work properly
I've had ctrl+f work for searching within the transcript on the page recently. I assumed it wouldn't due to lazy loading, but was surprised because the video I tried it on was quite long. filmot.com exists too (found it on here, currently can't get past the cloudflare captcha to double check), but I have no idea how much of youtube's transcripts it has archived.
> I've had ctrl+f work for searching within the transcript on the page recently.
I assumed it wouldn't due to lazy loading, but was surprised because the video I tried it on was quite long.
That was previously the case for me, none of the results outside of the current view would show up.
I just went to try, and I noticed that you can actually search in a transcript now!? There's a search bar
Re: Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters
#83Just asking: Is there an open source project that I can self-host that can organize my current subscriptions into separate groups/categories and make things easy to view/hide/digest? Many moons ago, I could hover and hide a video I didn't want to see in my feed with a single click. Best UX user feature evar... it was gone in a week or two I feel. I'm kinda ashamed to say I have multiple youtube accounts to keep my sa…
EDIT: Sorry I realised you were asking more about categorisation and not downloading.
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The closest thing I can think of is Tube Archivist, which seems made for archiving large YouTube collections, including things like comments on videos.
I’ve had mixed luck with it and it’s a bit too heavy for my fairly limited needs. Youtube-dl hasn’t worked for me for the last month or so on it —- oddly enough I have a MeTube instance on the same physical machine (different VM) which is a lighter web UI for yt-dlp and which is still working fine. That’s Youtube’s fault I assume and not the fault of Tube Archivist.
Re: Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters
#84Can anyone describe the problem and use-case in more detail? I've heard this before but it just doesn't resonate at all, and I'm a pretty heavy YouTube user.
I mostly watch videos from my home feed or from channels I subscribe to. When I search it's almost always either:
- film/game trailers I've heard about and want to find (e.g. gta vi trailer)
- videos I've watched before but maybe not liked, with a channel keyword and maybe video keyword (e.g. tom scott bell), or music
- tutorials, where I don't really care about the specific video, I care about the outcome (e.g. how to remove roller blind)
In all of these cases search seems to nail it. The trailer is always the first result (but could be from a variety of sources), the recall on videos I've seen before is basically perfect, and the tutorials get me to the right outcome.
Are people using search for discovery, like putting in a vague topic and trying to explore a topic from search? What specific kinds of queries does it do badly at?
Re: Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters
#85Just asking: Is there an open source project that I can self-host that can organize my current subscriptions into separate groups/categories and make things easy to view/hide/digest? Many moons ago, I could hover and hide a video I didn't want to see in my feed with a single click. Best UX user feature evar... it was gone in a week or two I feel. I'm kinda ashamed to say I have multiple youtube accounts to keep my sa…
Yes any RSS reader works for this task. There are two types of channel RSS feeds https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id= And the older https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user= Youtube used to have an opml export button but there are a few github projects that convert the youtube subscription csv that dumps out of the account data export. Edit: If you want to filter out shorts using the selfhosted a…
This is great!
Re: Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters
#86The date filters seem to be ignored for certain search terms and not others. Searching for, say, "dune before:2019-04-05" filters as expected, but searching for current events proximate terms like "iran" or "donald" returns results that disregard the date ceiling completely.
Re: Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters
#87Can anyone describe the problem and use-case in more detail? I've heard this before but it just doesn't resonate at all, and I'm a pretty heavy YouTube user. I mostly watch videos from my home feed or from channels I subscribe to. When I search it's almost always either: - film/game trailers I've heard about and want to find (e.g. gta vi trailer) - videos I've watched before but maybe not liked, with a channel keywor…
>What specific kinds of queries does it do badly at?
in my experience all of them, because the experience for me currently is that youtube surfaces ~3 videos relevant to the search I entered, then the bizarre category of "here's other stuff you want to watch" (I don't) followed by "stuff you already watched but want to watch again" (I don't and didn't ask), followed by like 10 shorts and then again a handful of results relevant to the query
Re: Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters
#88Potentially unpopular idea: Maybe YouTube search is so bad because videos are poorly optimized for search. Today most of the emphasis to creators on YouTube is to create content that targets browse traffic and shorts to go viral and get millions of views. Not so much videos targeting specific user intent with a term that might get 2k views per month if it ranks #1.
Your idea doesn't explain why: - YouTube search often doesn't return the correct video when we search an exact title - YouTube search shows entirely unrelated videos after the first 4-5 results
-YouTube search returns popular completely unrelated content (mostly brainrot) which is clearly feeding to users to watch in case they forgot they were searching for something else
-YouTube search returns unrelated videos that were partially watched
Clearly the youtube search is broken on purpose. It's hard to forget how google search went from good to barely usable and it's hard not to notice how they're applying the same strategy
Re: Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters
#89Downfall of youtube is one word: shorts.
Re: Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters
#90Can anyone describe the problem and use-case in more detail? I've heard this before but it just doesn't resonate at all, and I'm a pretty heavy YouTube user. I mostly watch videos from my home feed or from channels I subscribe to. When I search it's almost always either: - film/game trailers I've heard about and want to find (e.g. gta vi trailer) - videos I've watched before but maybe not liked, with a channel keywor…
>What specific kinds of queries does it do badly at? in my experience all of them, because the experience for me currently is that youtube surfaces ~3 videos relevant to the search I entered, then the bizarre category of "here's other stuff you want to watch" (I don't) followed by "stuff you already watched but want to watch again" (I don't and didn't ask), followed by like 10 shorts and then again a handful of resul…
I haven't noticed this because in all of the above examples the first result is the one I want, almost without exception. In a scenario where the top result or two is correct, showing other stuff after result 3 doesn't sound that bad.
What sorts of searches are you doing? My guess is this really matters and that you're using search for a completely different purpose to me, but I don't know what that is.