I wanted to try it but for some reason it doesn't accept Lex Fridman's channel as a valid URL: https://www.youtube.com/c/lexfridman
I tried with some other channels. Looks like It's not accepting all channels as valid urls.
Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
61–70 of 138 posts
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#62Hi, 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
Based purely on the speed of the results, I believe that the crawling is happening in real time.
The search is scoped by channel, so the closed-caption files for all the videos in the channel are downloaded and searched for on the fly.
Edit: Wow, thanks to dev tools, I can see that the website is downloading the transcript and metadata for all the videos from the channel to the client. So the search is happening client-side!!
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
YouTube doesn't provide a way to search all of YouTube based on the spoken words in videos, unfortunately. I could update VideoMentions Search to allow users to select multiple channels, and then perform the search across all of those. Like maybe maybe auto-importing all the channels they're subscribed to could be useful. One way or another though, it would still require selecting specific channels to search within.…
This field was a blocker for me as well. If the channel field was an async select that helped autocomplete lookup channel urls by channel name, this would be way more convenient. My use case would be for ham radio. Lots of ham radio YouTubers film their QSOs (conversations) and mention the callsigns that they make contact with. I want to find the channels that mention my callsign and I'm sure lots of other hams would…
I agree! This is how the paid VideoMentions.com service works- users can search for channels by name, without the need to paste in URLs. This auto-complete lookup requires spending a finite number of API calls, though, which is why it’s restricted to customers and not available on this freely accessible VideoMentions Search page. Thanks for checking it out!
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#64Dear @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?
Hey @TurningNYC! Thanks for reaching out. Yes, I'd be happy to speak with you regarding API access and enterprise subscription plans. You can reach out to me at kellenmace at gmail dot com. Thanks! Talk to you soon.
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#65Pretty cool. I could see this as a useful automated tool for companies to monitor their brand, or competitors. Maybe a weekly report of channels that have mentioned specific keywords.
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#66Hey HN! I just launched VideoMentions Search, a free tool that allows you to search YouTube to find videos that contain specific spoken words. Here's how to quickly try it out - Let's say you want to find every video on The Verge's YouTube channel within the last several months in which "MacBook Pro" is mentioned. Here's a pre-populated search to accomplish that: https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A…
Are the video transcripts searchable?
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#67Hey HN! I just launched VideoMentions Search, a free tool that allows you to search YouTube to find videos that contain specific spoken words. Here's how to quickly try it out - Let's say you want to find every video on The Verge's YouTube channel within the last several months in which "MacBook Pro" is mentioned. Here's a pre-populated search to accomplish that: https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A…
How are you sourcing the text for the videos? This search [1] grabs some results for my query, but it does miss this [2] video which contains the searched keyword multiple times, and the video's subtitles indicates as much. [1] https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A%252F%... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3denP7wX2XU&t=296s
VideoMentions scrapes the video page markup and pulls out the "baseUrl" for the English caption track. It converts that XML caption track into JSON, then searches it for keyword matches. You're right that this particular search for "toxic" should find several spoken word matches, but it doesn't. It seems like the tool isn't able to access the captions data for that video for some reason. I made a note of this bug, and I'll look into fixing it. Thanks for pointing it out, and for checking out VideoMentions Search!
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#68Hey HN! I just launched VideoMentions Search, a free tool that allows you to search YouTube to find videos that contain specific spoken words. Here's how to quickly try it out - Let's say you want to find every video on The Verge's YouTube channel within the last several months in which "MacBook Pro" is mentioned. Here's a pre-populated search to accomplish that: https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A…
Are the video transcripts searchable?
Yes, this is how VideoMentions Search works. It scrapes the video page markup and pulls out the "baseUrl" for the English caption track. It converts that XML caption track into JSON, then searches it for keyword matches. Is that what you're asking about?
If you want to search within the transcript of a single video, you can accomplish that with these steps: https://kb.swtc.edu/page.php?id=90230
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#69Hey HN! I just launched VideoMentions Search, a free tool that allows you to search YouTube to find videos that contain specific spoken words. Here's how to quickly try it out - Let's say you want to find every video on The Verge's YouTube channel within the last several months in which "MacBook Pro" is mentioned. Here's a pre-populated search to accomplish that: https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A…
I tried on this channel which is in Spanish [1] and it returned very fast with no results. Then tried on GeoWizard channel (English) and it worked great. There is a somewhat related tool called Youglish that works on subtitles, it's great for checking the pronunciation or usage of a word or expression in many languages, but it's based on a curated list of channels with known good subtitles. I thought yours could be a…
Hey @jobigoud! Yeah, currently VideoMentions only uses the auto-generated English video transcriptions when searching for matches. If there was enough demand, it could be expanded to support other languages. Doing so would add complexity and would make searches take much longer, though. I'd probably need to add more UI fields to allow users to select the languages to target. Could be done, though!
Yes, youglish.com is a neat tool! I stumbled upon it when looking around for a way to search YouTube videos based on spoken words.
Thanks for checking it out! :)
Re: Show HN: VideoMentions – Search YouTube based on the spoken words in videos
#70Are we sure YouTube doesn't already do this? Often I have searched for a video while only remembering a certain phrase or even a certain comment left under it, and YouTube was able to actually find it
They do... contents of speech are one of multiple input data to youtube indexing. Also you can search individual videos by showing transcript and pressing ctrl-f
I didn't know this...how do you show transcript?