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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

#91

Post by lostinroutine »

hbn wrote: post #56
andai wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also suffered from this issue for a while but then discovered "Unhook" browser extension, which in addition to many other amazing features (e.g. hide recommended videos/comments) has a feature to hide irrelevant search results. With the feature on I get an endless list of matching results and no junk.

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

#93

Post by messe »

kellenmace wrote: post #85
wolongong942 wrote: post #80

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 t…

Hey @wolongong942! Nice- I'm glad you're finding it useful! VideoMentions Search is built entirely using serverless technologies, so it should scale really well. There's no single server or database to act as a bottleneck. When you perform a search, your browser fires off a number of network requests to serverless function API endpoints that fetch the data from YouTube, then return a response. So if you do an "All ti…

What're the (approximate) costs for monthly usage? (Or if you don't know yet: what're you budgeting for?)

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

#94

Post by loxias »

kellenmace wrote: post #82
loxias wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 yo…

"I assume you're getting hugged to death" -- lol Yeah, maybe I'll consider having two versions of search - one version for paid customers that allows you to search for YouTube channels by name/keyword and allows you to search across all the channels you're subscribed to or across all the videos in your watch history, and a second version that's free and similar to the current iteration. VideoMentions Search should wo…

(firstly, that search works fine and returns very quickly! Now that I know it's client side, I've been able to do a few searches of my own to see how it works. It works well! The ones I did earlier were looking at a large channel "PBS Newshour" for various news topics over "All time")

(secondly, DO consider putting your email address on your HN profile!)

Whoa! Client side!?! Far out man, far out. To be honest, I was a little unimpressed before -- but didn't feel like "your idea is _brilliant_, but implementation leaves a lot to be desired. makes me want to try my hand at writing my own." would be a constructive comment. ;-)

But, knowing this is all done client side?? I tip my hat, that's *clever*! The whole site could be a static and local set of files? I had no idea things like this could even be done without a server or other real program to do the work. (though now that I think about it, I have an idea how, duh. YouTube exposes a JS API I bet, so you can have the client call it each time, do the searching work, &c.)

That avoids scalability issues and probably legal ones as well! What a game changer...

Was there an existing framework used for building client side web apps like this, or did you roll your own?

While I've got you, and I admit that graphical UIs are ... an area where my opinion should carry no weight (I'm the sort who.. doesn't use icons, and when writing personal tools, the "user interface" is positional parameters to a command line program ;-)), here are some suggestions:

* The UI, while clean and unbusy (yay!!), feels BLOATED with white space. Why do the results occupy this tiny narrow column, forcing me to scroll way more than I should need to?

* In addition to the narrow column, the entries IN the column take up too much space, the UI could be arranged to be much more efficient.

* Since search results are within a channel, don't put the channel name after each entry, there's no point.

* Might be nice to have the time offset visible to the left of the text excerpt. I can see it on mouseover, but still. Might be nice to see.

* Can the videos be made to play inline, without redirecting to youtube, then navigating back, and redoing the search?

* Perhaps, after searching for a result, we could see a graph at the top showing all the videos containing that term over time, and easily click on it to go directly there.

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

#95

Post by tcmb »

kellenmace wrote: post #67
CopOnTheRun wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

yt-dlp [1] has command-line options to download only the captions of a video, in available languages, if you want to skip the scraping for the link.

I built something similar [2] for a slightly different use case. I wanted to be able to search through all Ram Dass talks in the 'Here and Now' podcast series on YT. I'm obviously not as skilled at CSS. :) And the display of timestamps is still a bit shaky, but for me it fulfills its purpose.

Since I'm able to preload all caption files ahead of time, I'm just using pcregrep for the search which does a pretty good job.

[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp [2] https://ramdass-search.net

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

#96

Post by alex_smart »

kellenmace wrote: post #75
hanniabu wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I do client-side in-memory caching of videos data, only.

This works only if the user does not navigate from and back to your website or refresh the page, but if they do, you make the same api calls all over again. You should set HTTP Cache-Control headers in your response from the server, so that the browser knows that it can serve that data from its cache and does not need to make those requests again. You would then probably not need the client-side in-memory cache at all.

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

#97

Post by filoeleven »

This is amazing.

I just tested it against a smallish British channel with a video that I wanted to see again, and couldn’t remember which one of the 50-odd videos it was. It did not carch the full quote directly, because YT read it as “Marvin nature” instead of “Mother Nature,” a consequence of Alfie’s accent. But my search for “Mother Nature” picked up another reference close enough to it to show the text. Sort of unlucky with the miss and very lucky with the proximity to the hit.

I drew a blank regarding the other channels whose videos I want to revisit, but I know I will think of them later because there are so many. This is extremely useful. I’ve already bookmarked the site.

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

#98

Post by tomatowurst »

kellenmace wrote: post #86
tomatowurst wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know this...how do you show transcript?

Hey @tomatowurst! You can search within the spoken words/transcript of a single YouTube video by following these steps: https://kb.swtc.edu/page.php?id=90230

This is so cool I had no idea this was possible I would often seek a particular segment manually. Thanks!

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

#99

Post by filoeleven »

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…

Your pricing model is really solid. I can see how useful this is to people or companies with a brand.

I don’t have one of those, but I can also easily imagine wanting to find “that one video that I watched a while ago” in some topical “power tools” channel where they talked about “parallel battery” tech, without recalling the channel name. If I really wanted to find that again in order to buy the tool, it’s easily worth $5. And then I have a whole month to chase down other vaguely-recalled references!

Well done. I hope this post gets the attention it deserves. You have solved a problem that many people have, and have griped about. Companies and people who maintain brands need to know about it. And your free tier (which I assume is funded by the paid options) has already helped me find something I’d been after for a while. I want this to stick around.

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

#100

Post by kellenmace »

kumarski wrote: post #59

Is this based on acoustic keyword recognition or SRT search?

I believe both, in most cases. When a video is uploaded to YouTube, YouTube runs the audio through a speech-to-text algorithm to generate the transcript for the video. And the generated text is also what's used for video captions, when they're turned on. When a search is performed via VideoMentions Search, the tool gets that auto-generated transcript and searches it to find keyword matches (along with the video's title and description). When a transcript is manually uploaded for a video, that is used instead.

Thanks for checking out my project!

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