Really useful tool! I watch a lot of cycling content and people do reviews of random products in the middle of videos, this helps narrow it down!
Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
21–30 of 138 posts
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#22One 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 har…
Also, the youtube built in search often fails to match videos that have a word in the title for which you search for.
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#23This is pretty amazing! Thank you for making it.
I'm not sure if this would be against Google's terms so you might want to check:
If you started indexing such that I could do a search and it would come back with any indexed content I think you would have invented a new search engine. Seems extremely useful.
I already use YouTube this way today but as you pointed out searching by title can be tricky.
Search engines supported by ads are also typically quite profitable.
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#24How is this different from what Google currently does for in-video text search?
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#25Dear @kellenmace - This seems like a great service! I tried to sign up and check out the site but didnt notice any contact info. Could you contact me? Curious if you offer an API facade and/or enterprise subscription plans?
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, you're exactly right. The tool works by getting the channel's videos, then fetching the voice-to-text transcripts for them, then searching within the spoken words (along with the title and description) for any keyword matches. So there isn't a feasible way to do that across all of YouTube. I like your idea of searching the logged-in user's history! That could be handy. Another thing I've thought about is auto-im…
Do you keep the transcripts around on the server? It shouldn't matter much in terms of storage unless the site becomes crazy popular, so you could offer a "best effort search" or something along the lines, that just searches everything you got so far, so the site would get better and better over time.
YouTube kills your API key if you do this and make the data available (eg via API).
You're allowed to cache responses for a bit but not store them long term. "How would they know", etc of course, but if you're distributing the data they'll figure it out. Some smart cookies over there at Google.
My small website managed to get on their radar and I didn't even post it to HN!
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#27Really useful tool! I watch a lot of cycling content and people do reviews of random products in the middle of videos, this helps narrow it down!
s/reviews/paid promotions/
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#28One 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 har…
Also, the youtube built in search often fails to match videos that have a word in the title for which you search for.
I can't even find a specific channel when I spell it correctly, even with double quotes. I have to go into the filters and specify channels-only, and even then it puts a bunch of wrong results in front of it. Their search on YouTube used to be better, showing results for what was actually searched for. But now it seems like they're trying to drive views to high-performing videos since they now give a single page of results for any query before backfilling the results with a bunch of suggestions that have nothing to do with the search
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#29Very cool, seems useful.
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, the youtube built in search often fails to match videos that have a word in the title for which you search for.
I can't even find a specific channel when I spell it correctly, even with double quotes. I have to go into the filters and specify channels-only, and even then it puts a bunch of wrong results in front of it. Their search on YouTube used to be better, showing results for what was actually searched for. But now it seems like they're trying to drive views to high-performing videos since they now give a single page of r…
Up until a few days ago I had a redirect for search that fisabled the suggestions on the search page. Now, if I do that, the search only gives 1, irrelevant, result.