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

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

#71

Post by barefeg »

kellenmace wrote: post #68
barefeg wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ah got it. I thought there would be some API where the transcripts could be searched across videos. Maybe that requires way to many resources for Google to index

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

#72

Post by kellenmace »

bredren wrote: post #44
kellenmace wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I get why you wouldn’t be able to index all of YouTube, that’s a big ask. However, I don’t use YouTube enough to mess w channels much. I’m usually searching on a particular topic. For example, “drop ceiling panel replacement.” Perhaps you could help users limit the channel scope by making an intelligent channel selection by keyword. So I would put in “home improvement,” and you could choose some appropriate channels…

Hey @bredren! Yeah, I agree that this makes for a nice user experience. This is how the paid VideoMentions.com service works- users can search for channels by name or keywords, without the need to paste in URLs. It looks like this: https://cloudup.com/cUgKqErcx8G

That 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, and for your feedback!

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

#74

Post by kellenmace »

joshvm wrote: post #53
kellenmace wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 youtu…

Oh, cool! I hadn't heard of the Key Moments/SeekToAction feature before. I'll have to dig in and explore that a bit. Thanks for the tip!

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

#75

Post by kellenmace »

hanniabu wrote: post #49
kellenmace wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you cache the channel, search term, and results for faster more efficient responses later?

Hey @hanniabu! I do client-side in-memory caching of videos data, only. No server-side caching. In fact, there is no database involved at all- the client-side app calls serverless function API endpoints to fetch the YouTube channel and video data it needs. Here are the tricks I'm using to make it fast:

- As soon as the "Channel URL" field loses focus, I start fetching the most recent 30 videos on that channel in the background. This way, by the time the user enters the keyword and date range, I've already fetched some (maybe even all!) of the data ahead of time, which means less wait time for them.

- Once a specific video's data (title, description, transcript, etc.) has been fetched once, it is saved in memory. All other searches the user performs from that point on will pull the video data from the in-memory cache, if it's there. Otherwise, it will fall back to fetching the video data over the network. This in-memory caching makes subsequent searches within the same date range (or a shorter date range) take - Network requests to fetch video data are processed concurrently rather than one at a time. So the browser fires off as many as it can in parallel to get them all resolved as quickly as possible.

- As soon as any matches are found, the UI updates to show the user. This way, the user can start scrolling through the matches and reviewing them while the search is still in progress– they don't have to wait until it finishes to start interacting with the matches.

Thanks for checking out my project!

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

#76

Post by kellenmace »

Nowado wrote: post #7
rodnim wrote: 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.

I'm sure it would be, but then you're indexing whole youtube with respect to words spoken in each video. A thing that Google, arguably the best organization when it comes to indexing stuff, is working on.

Yes, my thoughts exactly. If Google decides that it's going to revamp YouTube search to include spoken word/transcription matches, that would make VideoMentions Search irrelevant– and I'd be okay with that!

In the meantime, I think this is a useful free tool for quickly finding spoken word matches within specific channels.

Thanks for checking it out!

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

#77

Post by kellenmace »

loxias wrote: post #42
kellenmace wrote: post #2

Hey 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…

This looks super cool! There's a need for tools to make the millions of videos on the web actually useful for people like me who would much rather skim search and read than watch. Bravo to you for making a stab at it! I'm guessing you need a specific channel as a way of getting a list of videos, then pulling the captioning, then searching? (That's the only reason I could think of for the channel restriction, which un…

Hey @loxias! Yes, you're exactly right - 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.

YouTube doesn't provide a way to search all of YouTube based on spoken words, unfortunately. Still, I think this is a useful tool for quickly locating spoken word matches within a certain channel.

Some Hacker News commenters have suggested that I could auto-import all the channels the user is subscribed to, or get videos from their watch history, which are interesting ideas. For this first iteration, I kept things simple with a single "Channel URL" input.

Thanks for checking out my project, and for your feedback!

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

#78

Post by loxias »

kellenmace wrote: post #77
loxias wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks super cool! There's a need for tools to make the millions of videos on the web actually useful for people like me who would much rather skim search and read than watch. Bravo to you for making a stab at it! I'm guessing you need a specific channel as a way of getting a list of videos, then pulling the captioning, then searching? (That's the only reason I could think of for the channel restriction, which un…

Hey @loxias! Yes, you're exactly right - 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. YouTube doesn't provide a way to search all of YouTube based on spoken words, unfortunately. Still, I think this is a useful tool for quickly locating spoken word matches within a certain chan…

> Still, I think this is a useful tool for quickly locating spoken word matches within a certain channel.

Absolutely, and I agree, however,.... it necessitates that the user use or understand "channels". When I went to your site my first thought was "what the hell's a channel?" ;-)

But yeah, for whatever percentage of youtube users use channels, I see this having a lot of use. My totally unsolicited advice is that you'll have to find some way to remove the channel requirement. Perhaps suggesting channels based on the search terms. (I've seen your other comments about adding features to a paid version)

I haven't yet managed to get VideoMentions to actually work, but that's fine, I assume you're getting hugged to death. :D Shipping anything is hard, and congrats for that.

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

#79

Post by bredren »

kellenmace wrote: post #72
bredren wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get why you wouldn’t be able to index all of YouTube, that’s a big ask. However, I don’t use YouTube enough to mess w channels much. I’m usually searching on a particular topic. For example, “drop ceiling panel replacement.” Perhaps you could help users limit the channel scope by making an intelligent channel selection by keyword. So I would put in “home improvement,” and you could choose some appropriate channels…

Hey @bredren! Yeah, I agree that this makes for a nice user experience. This is how the paid VideoMentions.com service works- users can search for channels by name or keywords, without the need to paste in URLs. It looks like this: https://cloudup.com/cUgKqErcx8G That 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…

Ah! Okay. Makes sense. Thanks for the reply, maybe I’ll try out the pro version.

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

#80

Post by wolongong942 »

Very interesting tool could see myself using it a lot.

Couldn't help but search the guy that uploaded 2 million vids to yt, sorry if it breaks anything.

It would be cool to search for a specific quote like "buddy of mine" (frequently said by Joe Rogan). Also searching for parts of a word (similar to regex options?) might be difficult to implement but would be super useful as an option i.e if i searched for any word that starts with yc with a correct pattern (or given option on the UI) i could find results for both "yc" and "ycombinator".

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