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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

#101

Post by silax »

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…

This is such a boss response. Good inspiration to incorporate attacker attacking into systems I build going forward.

"Heh I might've just bricked you" -> "I don't think so, but you might've bricked yourself."

Next step- have the browser send a single request per video, directly to YouTube. Actually, make it 2 or 3 just for redundancy. Then do the caption processing in-browser. Or better yet, distribute an ~electron~ app that runs this locally in the background with a separate process to autorespawn if quit.

Separately and seriously, you should triple your pricing for this.

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

#104

Post by kellenmace »

dmead wrote: post #92

would you add support for regexes? I would like to search for rich evans saying "aiiiiiiiiids" with varying word length but now i can only search for "aids" https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A%252F%...

Hey @dmead! Yeah, I would consider adding support for regex/advanced filtering options if there was enough demand for it. For now, I’d recommend either separate searches or performing a search, the doing ctrl/cmd+f to search within the matches on the page.

Thanks for checking it out!

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

#106

Post by kellenmace »

baxuz wrote: post #17

This is amazing. I actually used yt-dlp to download all subtitles and search in them a few times already. Thanks a lot!

Hey @baxuz! Nice- I’m glad you like it! I hope it continues to come in handy.

Thanks for checking out my project!

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

#107

Post by kellenmace »

truly wrote: post #15
kellenmace wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.…

Perhaps you could have channel owners register their channel if they want to be indexed. That would be super useful.

Hey @truly- this is a good thought, but I think it would be impossible to get buy-in from enough channels to make it useful. I could update the UI to support searching across multiple channels at once, though, or pull the channels from the user’s subscriptions or watches videos list. I’ll see if there’s enough demand for those features, then consider adding them.

Thanks for checking out my project!

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

#108

Post by kellenmace »

sph wrote: post #46
Akronymus wrote: post #22

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.

Unreasonable of you to expect search to be good in a Google product.

lol- my thoughts exactly. How can Google search be so good, while YouTube search is so abysmal? Google bought YouTube in 2006, so they've had 16 years to get it right :D

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

#109

Post by kellenmace »

filoeleven wrote: post #97

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 u…

Hey @filoeleven! Great- glad to hear you're finding it useful!

Thanks for checking out my project! :)

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

#110

Post by kellenmace »

silax wrote: post #101
kellenmace wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is such a boss response. Good inspiration to incorporate attacker attacking into systems I build going forward. "Heh I might've just bricked you" -> "I don't think so, but you might've bricked yourself." Next step- have the browser send a single request per video, directly to YouTube. Actually, make it 2 or 3 just for redundancy. Then do the caption processing in-browser. Or better yet, distribute an ~electron~…

Hey @silax! Good thoughts. Some requests can't be sent from the browser directly to YouTube due to the Content Security Policy directives that YouTube has in place, though.

For example, if you try to run this code to fetch a YouTube video page in the browser console from any non-YouTube site (like Hacker News or VideoMentions), you'll see the it errors out:

(async () => { const response = await fetch('https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irjc1nJ1eJs'); console.log(response); })();

That's why my app uses serverless API endpoints as a middleman. It works like this:

1. Browser fires off a request to the API endpoint.

2. The serverless function Node.js process spins up, fetches the data from YouTube, returns the response, then spins back down.

3. My app takes the video data in the response, saves it in memory, searches it for matches, and re-renders the UI to show the matches, if any.

I built my app to do as much work as possible client-side, and to use serverless function API endpoints for anything that can't be done in-browser.

Thanks for checking out my project!

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