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Show HN: A search engine for deleted YouTube videos (1.5B+ indexed since 2005)

tube.archivarix.net

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Re: Show HN: A search engine for deleted YouTube videos (1.5B+ indexed since 2005)

#3

Post by archivarix »

Search engine for YouTube content that's no longer on YouTube: deleted, removed, region-blocked, DMCA'd. ~1.5B videos indexed from 2005 onwards by aggregating archive sources Internet Archive Wayback Machine (CDX + HEAD-spread discovery), Common Crawl. What you get for any video ID: metadata (title, description, channel, upload date, duration, view counts, tags), thumbnails, original captions when the archive captured them, and reconstructed URLs to play the archived video file when available. Channel discovery reconciles legacy username/handle eras to a single canonical identity (lots of channels renamed themselves a dozen times — that part was painful).

Re: Show HN: A search engine for deleted YouTube videos (1.5B+ indexed since 2005)

#5

Post by [deleted] »

archivarix wrote: post #3

Search engine for YouTube content that's no longer on YouTube: deleted, removed, region-blocked, DMCA'd. ~1.5B videos indexed from 2005 onwards by aggregating archive sources Internet Archive Wayback Machine (CDX + HEAD-spread discovery), Common Crawl. What you get for any video ID: metadata (title, description, channel, upload date, duration, view counts, tags), thumbnails, original captions when the archive capture…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: A search engine for deleted YouTube videos (1.5B+ indexed since 2005)

#9

Post by n1xis10t »

n1xis10t wrote: post #8

Seems pretty cool. So this is a recent project, and you haven’t been working on this since 2005 right? Have you considered also indexing videos that haven’t been deleted?

Update: So I mustered the courage to try the search engine, because it was looking not very much like a scam, and it becomes very apparent as soon as you use it that non-deleted videos are also indexed.

Re: Show HN: A search engine for deleted YouTube videos (1.5B+ indexed since 2005)

#10

Post by archivarix »

n1xis10t wrote: post #9
n1xis10t wrote: post #8

Seems pretty cool. So this is a recent project, and you haven’t been working on this since 2005 right? Have you considered also indexing videos that haven’t been deleted?

Update: So I mustered the courage to try the search engine, because it was looking not very much like a scam, and it becomes very apparent as soon as you use it that non-deleted videos are also indexed.

Yes, the database contains all the videos, both deleted and active ones. Or rather, not the videos themselves, but the metadata and links to the video files in the web archive. I don't have servers large enough to store the videos themselves.
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