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Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos

videomentions.com

51–60 of 138 posts

Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos

#52
Great job!

How do you do search result ranking? Any signals that you use to decide “this is a high quality video from reputable channel and it’s relevant”? I would imagine # of followers / likes / comments / like-comment ratio or the likes are used?

Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos

#53
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - You remember watching a video where a certain topic was discussed, and now you're trying to remember which video it was to rewatch it. But I need to remember which channel I watched? Maybe I'm missing something, but in my eyes it would make it tremendously more useful if I didn't have to specify channel.

Yeah, YouTube doesn't provide a way to search all of YouTube based on the spoken words in videos. I could update VideoMentions Search to allow users to select multiple channels, and then perform the search across all of those (maybe importing all the channels they're subscribed to could be handy... ). One way or another though, it would still require selecting specific channels to search within. That limitation notwi…

They don't offer direct search, but isn't this what "key moments" is in search results? Try eg how to change a lightbulb.

I believe SeekToAction works even if the uploader didn't put chapters in. This was a relatively recent update, to make it fully automatic. So it's presumably doing some audio/video analysis to figure it out. All you need to do is tell Google how to seek your video (so it also works with non youtube videos too).

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/07/new-way-ke...

Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos

#55
FWIW Google already shows videos by their transcripts if the video has automatic captions or CC enabled in the Google search results. Try searching for a very specific phrase/sentence in quotes and it's likely you'll get the video in Google Search result page.

Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos

#56
post #32

Earlier 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.

YouTube search is almost completely useless, I just use Google to find YouTube videos. It does seem to search in the video transcript and the comments (I'm not sure but it seems that way).

YouTube's search results will show you like 10 results of the thing you actually searched for, then resort to a section of completely random video suggestions unrelated to your search in hopes some thumbnail will draw your attention and suck you back in to wasting your time watching videos and being served ads.

Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos

#57

Hi, Great job. I was almost about to build such a thing before I realized the crazy amount of crawling and transcriptions that I have to index. How exactly did you solve/approach the problem? 1. How did you crawl across those millions of videos from the platform? 2. How are you indexing stuff like that

I built something similar to this when I was first learning to program. Except mine lets you perform a one-time search for videos containing keywords, similar to how you would normally search YouTube. So there are no notifications or anything.

https://phrasefinder.net

I don’t know if it even works anymore and I’m sure the code is atrocious. But I remember that I would just scrape YouTube pages for video IDs, and then use an API that returned video captions for a given ID [1]. I could see how OP would do something similar.

[1] https://pypi.org/project/youtube-transcript-api/

Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos

#60

Earlier 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…

You should be able to just go directly to the channel using the URL if you know the channel name. youtube.com/c/. What on earth they use the distinction for, I don't know, but if it's a user with videos instead of a channel, then youtube.com/user/.
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