11 ms·

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

295 points by kellenmace 4y ago

kellenmace 4y ago
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%252F%252Fwww.youtube.com%252Fc%252FTheVerge&keywords=MacBook%2520Pro&dateRange=3 https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A%252F%... If you follow that ^ link, then click the button to perform the search, you'll see all matching videos, with every single mention of "MacBook Pro" highlighted. My favorite part is that all the highlighted matches are timestamped. So you can click on any of them to jump to that exact moment in the video when that keyword was said! VideoMentions Search is great for these scenarios: - You want to find all videos within a YouTube channel that mention your brand, your product, or the topics you care about. - 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. - You run your own YouTube channel and want to quickly find the exact moments in your videos where you cover certain topics, so you can link others to that content. I have wanted a way to search YouTube based on spoken words for a while. I couldn't find a tool that provides that capability though, so I built it! I hope you find VideoMentions Search useful! I'd love to hear any feedback you have on it. Please let me know!
- rodnim 4y ago
  > - 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.
  - Nowado 4y ago
    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.
    - kellenmace 4y ago
      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!
  - kellenmace 4y ago
    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 notwithstanding, I still think it's a useful tool, though! Thanks for checking it out!
    - mistermann 4y ago
      Could you do a search based on their watch history if they have it enabled?
      - hanniabu 4y ago
        That'd certainly be useful
      - kellenmace 4y ago
        This is a cool idea! It wouldn't apply to people who want to search all the videos on a given channel for specific keywords (including those they haven't watched). I can see it being useful for folks trying to locate a specific video they remember watching in the past, though. One consideration is that getting the user's watch history would likely require calls to the YouTube API. So that means I would have to make this a paid service in order to offset the code of those API requests. The beautiful thing about the current iteration is that it doesn't rely on YouTube's API at all. By scraping YouTube pages and leveraging a few NPM packages, I'm currently able to offer free and unrestricted access to it. If enough people request that ability though, I'll consider incorporating it. Thanks for checking out my project and for the great idea!
- jobigoud 4y ago
  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 great complement to this as it works directly on the audio. [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Tercosmicqueen https://www.youtube.com/c/Tercosmicqueen
  - kellenmace 4y ago
    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! :)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- corobo 4y ago
  Very cool! Well done! I've not got a legit use for it right now but the few example searches I thought up returned the videos I was thinking of Nice work!
  - kellenmace 4y ago
    Cool! Thank you! Here are some example use-cases that I included in another comment, in case any of them are relevant to you: 1. You want to find all videos within a YouTube channel that mention your brand, your product, or the topics you care about. 2. 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. 3. You run your own YouTube channel and want to quickly find the exact moments in your videos where you cover certain topics, so you can link others to that content. Maybe #2 happens occasionally? If so, maybe you can bookmark VideoMentions Search for just such an occasion :) In any event, thanks for checking out my project, and for the kind words!
    - corobo 4y ago
      Site's definitely bookmarked in my toolbox for sure! I imagine #2 will be my primary use case personally -- If not for me, to answer "Does anyone know the video where.." e: thinking about it I know a few people who pull highlights out of their older content (sort of #3). Shared with them :)
      - corobo 4y ago
        They loved it if you see any stats along the line of Scotland/UK + Discord referral haha
- loxias 4y ago
  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 unfortunately removes 90% of the utility)
  - kellenmace 4y ago
    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!
    - loxias 4y ago
      > 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.
      - kellenmace 4y ago
- CopOnTheRun 4y ago
  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%252Fwww.youtube.com%252Fuser%252Faragusea&keywords=toxic&dateRange=all https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A%252F%... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3denP7wX2XU&t=296s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3denP7wX2XU&t=296s
  - kellenmace 4y ago
    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!
    - tcmb 4y ago
      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 https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp [2] https://ramdass-search.net https://ramdass-search.net
- barefeg 4y ago
  Are the video transcripts searchable?
  - kellenmace 4y ago
    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 https://kb.swtc.edu/page.php?id=90230
    - barefeg 4y ago
      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
      - kellenmace 4y ago
        Yeah, Google is of course the king of search, so they could certainly decide to revamp YouTube search to include spoken word/transcription matches. They have all the data required to make that happen. That would make VideoMentions Search irrelevant– and I'd be okay with that! In the meantime, I think this is a useful tool for quickly locating videos based on spoken words. Thanks for checking out my project!
- Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
  Congratulations on the launch! VideoMentions is addressing the need-gap: 'Searching YouTube videos with transcript'[1] posted on my problem validation forum. I appreciate that rather than just building a browser add-on to search individual video, You've built a business use case for brand monitoring. I hope you get profitable enough to afford the compute necessary to monitor top channels without having to explicitly mention them. You're welcomed to explain how it addresses that problem at needgap, So those who need it can find it easily. [1]: https://needgap.com/problems/88-searching-youtube-videos-with-transcript-youtube-transcript https://needgap.com/problems/88-searching-youtube-videos-wit...
truly 4y ago
Nice! Is it possible to do it without fixing the channel?
- dankwizard 4y ago
  I'm assuming it's using the API to download captions and scanning them, which is why it'd need the Channel. It would be so hard to know where to begin without it! Potentially future updates could search a logged in user's history?
  - kellenmace 4y ago
    Yep, you're exactly right. The tool works by getting the channel's videos, then fetching the voice-to-text transcripts for them, then searching within the spoken words (along with the title and description) for any keyword matches. So there isn't a feasible way to do that across all of YouTube. I like your idea of searching the logged-in user's history! That could be handy. Another thing I've thought about is auto-importing all the channels they're subscribed to so they can search within those. For the first version of VideoMentions Search, I kept things simple with a single "Channel URL" input field, but using their history/subscriptions is totally doable. I'll see if there's enough demand for that. In any event, I still think that this simple first version has utility. I like being able to quickly pinpoint all the moments when a certain topic was mentioned across all of a channel's videos. Thanks so much for taking a look, and for your feedback!
    - fps_doug 4y ago
      Do you keep the transcripts around on the server? It shouldn't matter much in terms of storage unless the site becomes crazy popular, so you could offer a "best effort search" or something along the lines, that just searches everything you got so far, so the site would get better and better over time.
      - corobo 4y ago
        YouTube kills your API key if you do this and make the data available (eg via API). You're allowed to cache responses for a bit but not store them long term. "How would they know", etc of course, but if you're distributing the data they'll figure it out. Some smart cookies over there at Google. My small website managed to get on their radar and I didn't even post it to HN!
PaulKeeble 4y ago
One of the consequences of the effectiveness of click-bait titles on youtube is that searching for videos you watched historically is extremely difficult, because quite often the primary thing in the video is never mentioned in the title. The descriptions are almost universally used to store common links that are about the channel not the video and the consequence of this is that click-bait titled content is very hard to find after the fact. The other problem is quite a lot of channels are testing one title and then changing to another, the video wont then be found using the initial title and so even if you do remember elements of the title the channel may have made that impossible to use some hours or days later as another title with better performance was used. I can see a need for search in the contents of the videos but I don't want to specify the channel, I likely don't know especially since channels can also change their name.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  Also, the youtube built in search often fails to match videos that have a word in the title for which you search for.
  - Minor49er 4y ago
    I can't even find a specific channel when I spell it correctly, even with double quotes. I have to go into the filters and specify channels-only, and even then it puts a bunch of wrong results in front of it. Their search on YouTube used to be better, showing results for what was actually searched for. But now it seems like they're trying to drive views to high-performing videos since they now give a single page of results for any query before backfilling the results with a bunch of suggestions that have nothing to do with the search
    - Akronymus 4y ago
      Up until a few days ago I had a redirect for search that fisabled the suggestions on the search page. Now, if I do that, the search only gives 1, irrelevant, result.
    - nonameiguess 4y ago
happy_pancake 4y ago
Nice! My friends and I had this idea for a hackathon and we won! We skipped lectures and we needed a way to fast forward to relevant parts of a lecture
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Cool @happy_pancake! Nice use-case! Is your project still online somewhere?
1970-01-01 4y ago
I wanted this just yesterday! I was searching several channels to recall how many bolts are holding the battery for the electric F150. Sure enough, Top Gear told me how many bolts the F150 used for its battery pack! Result: SPOKEN WORDS "…kept things simple it recycled the same basic chassis and attach the battery which can be removed with just eight bolts from underneath and used carryover components wherever possible in fact…"
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Nice! Perfect timing, then! Glad you're finding it useful! :)
baxuz 4y ago
This is amazing. I actually used yt-dlp to download all subtitles and search in them a few times already. Thanks a lot!
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Hey @baxuz! Nice- I’m glad you like it! I hope it continues to come in handy. Thanks for checking out my project!
HAL9OOO 4y ago
Really useful tool! I watch a lot of cycling content and people do reviews of random products in the middle of videos, this helps narrow it down!
- prg318 4y ago
  s/reviews/paid promotions/
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
This is pretty amazing! Thank you for making it. I'm not sure if this would be against Google's terms so you might want to check: If you started indexing such that I could do a search and it would come back with any indexed content I think you would have invented a new search engine. Seems extremely useful. I already use YouTube this way today but as you pointed out searching by title can be tricky. Search engines supported by ads are also typically quite profitable.
anoncow 4y ago
How is this different from what Google currently does for in-video text search?
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Currently, YouTube does not reliably include spoken word/transcript matches in search results. You would have to manually open each individual video in a browser tab, open the transcript, hit cmd/ctrl+f and search for the words you're interested in. And if you need to search tens/hundreds/thousands of videos, that would take a very long time. VideoMentions Search allows you to specify the channel URL, keywords and date range, then does all that hard work for you, quickly locating all videos that contain those keywords. I hope that's helpful. Thanks for checking out my project!
  - anoncow 4y ago
    Thank you for responding. This looks like a very cool project.
TuringNYC 4y ago
Dear @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?
- kellenmace 4y ago
  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.
ss108 4y ago
Very cool, seems useful.
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Thanks! Glad you think so. Thanks for checking it out!
HidyBush 4y ago
Are 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
- cphoover 4y ago
  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
  - tomatowurst 4y ago
    I didn't know this...how do you show transcript?
    - kellenmace 4y ago
      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 https://kb.swtc.edu/page.php?id=90230
      - tomatowurst 4y ago
        This is so cool I had no idea this was possible I would often seek a particular segment manually. Thanks!
        kellenmace 4y ago
        Welcome! :)
  - kellenmace 4y ago
    I have come to the opposite conclusion - YouTube does not reliably include spoken word/transcript matches in search results. As I wrote in another comment, I've run tests where I open up the transcript of a video using these steps (https://kb.swtc.edu/page.php?id=90230 https://kb.swtc.edu/page.php?id=90230), copy a few of the words, then perform a search using those words across that channel, and the video I copied the words from doesn't appear on the list of results. 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!
nop_slide 4y ago
Nothing of note to say other than this is really cool!
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Thanks @nop_slide! Glad you dig it! Thanks for trying it out! :)
atentaten 4y ago
This is a nice tool. I wish one didn't have to specify the channel, as some comments mentioned. If it's not possible to get the channel when providing the video url via an API, it is possible to get it from the video url's GET response data. The latter may be little slower, but might be worth it in terms of UX.
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Hey @atentaten! YouTube doesn't provide a way to search across all of YouTube based on transcriptions/spoken words, unfortunately. That's why specifying a channel is required. Once the user provides a channel URL, then VideoMentions Search can perform an on-the-fly search of the videos on that channel to identify matches. Thanks for checking out my project!
lewisjoe 4y ago
Hi, 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
- jonplackett 4y ago
  Bump. Would like the lowdown too!
  - kellenmace 4y ago
    Hey @jonplackett! as @alex_smart noticed in another comment, I am performing on-the-fly searches on the client. 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 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. I replied to @lewisjoe's comment above this one with some more details about tricks I'm employing to make searches fast. Thanks for checking out my project!
- SteveDR 4y ago
  I built something similar to this when I was first learning to program. Except mine lets you perform a one-time search for videos containing keywords, similar to how you would normally search YouTube. So there are no notifications or anything. https://phrasefinder.net https://phrasefinder.net I don’t know if it even works anymore and I’m sure the code is atrocious. But I remember that I would just scrape YouTube pages for video IDs, and then use an API that returned video captions for a given ID [1]. I could see how OP would do something similar. [1] https://pypi.org/project/youtube-transcript-api/ https://pypi.org/project/youtube-transcript-api/
mikewhy 4y ago
I've been wanting to make a supercut of Civvie 11 mentioning John Carmack but have been putting it off. This just did half the work for me, amazing!
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Nice! Glad to be of assistance :)
wenbin 4y ago
Great job! How do you do search result ranking? Any signals that you use to decide “this is a high quality video from reputable channel and it’s relevant”? I would imagine # of followers / likes / comments / like-comment ratio or the likes are used?
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Thank you! I don't do anything fancy at the moment. The matching videos are presented in reverse chronological order. So you'll see the most recent videos that contain the keywords at the top, then older video matches as you scroll down the page. And the user provides the URL of the single YouTube channel they want to search within. Thanks for checking out my project!
atleta 4y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/c/lexfridman
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Thanks for bringing this up, @atleta– I'll look into why that particular channel URL doesn't work.
- pks016 4y ago
  I tried with some other channels. Looks like It's not accepting all channels as valid urls.
  - kellenmace 4y ago
    Hey @pks016 - if you recall a new channel URLs that didn't work, can you please reply with them? Then I can look into why and fix that bug. Thanks for checking out my project!
alpb 4y ago
FWIW Google already shows videos by their transcripts if the video has automatic captions or CC enabled in the Google search results. Try searching for a very specific phrase/sentence in quotes and it's likely you'll get the video in Google Search result page.
- kellenmace 4y ago
  I have found that this method is unreliable. If I run a Google search for "the "paradox of choice. You have so many choices, how do you know which one to pick? Even when I recommend to newer developers in the React", no YouTube video results are displayed, despite the fact that that exact string of text exists in the transcript of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQntFkK8Z54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQntFkK8Z54 That's why I built VideoMentions Search. It pulls in the transcript for every video within the channel and date range you selected and shows you any and all matches. Also - even when a Google search does work to find a video based on spoken words, all you're given is a link to that video's page. You can't see all the times that keyword was mentioned within the video and click on one of those mentions to jump to that exact moment in the video, like you can with VideoMentions Search. If Google/YouTube added those capabilities, then VideoMentions Search would be irrelevant. In the meantime though, I think it's a useful free tool for quickly finding spoken word matches within a specific channel. Thanks for checking it out!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kumarski 4y ago
Is this based on acoustic keyword recognition or SRT search?
- kellenmace 4y ago
  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!
ojiwan 4y ago
Pretty 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.
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Thanks @ojiwan! Yeah, that's precisely what the paid offering on the VideoMentions.com homepage is. It currently emails the user once for each matching video, but in the future, I could certainly add support for grouping them and sending weekly digests, like you're describing. Thanks for checking out my project!
dmead 4y ago
red letter media likes to talk about star trek https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.youtube.com%252Fuser%252FRedLetterMedia&keywords=star%2520trek&dateRange=all https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A%252F%...
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Haha- looks like it :)
wolongong942 4y ago
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".
- kellenmace 4y ago
  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 time" search on a channel with 2 million videos, your laptop fan may kick on while your browser works hard firing off thousand and thousands of requests until it's fetched all 2 million videos, you run out of memory, or you manually hit the "Cancel" button - whichever comes first :) Your regex idea is interesting, and I'll consider implementing some more complex rules like that if enough people request it. For now, my answer would be to either perform separate searches (like one for "yc" and another for "ycombinator"), or perform one search, then use ctrl/cmd+f to search within the matches displayed on the page. Thanks for checking out my project, and for the great feedback!
  - messe 4y ago
    What're the (approximate) costs for monthly usage? (Or if you don't know yet: what're you budgeting for?)
    - kellenmace 4y ago
      Hey @messe! I built VideoMentions Search with a combination of custom code and a couple NPM packages that are able to scrape publicly accessible YouTube pages to get the channel and videos data the app relies on. So because it doesn't use the YouTube API at all, the total monthly cost is $0 :) That's why I'm able to offer free, unrestricted access to the tool and allow folks to perform unlimited searches. Thanks for checking out my project! I hope you find it useful!
galori 4y ago
This is neat, but I would like it to search against the entire archive of all youtube videos. I know you can't do that...but perhaps a Google employee making use of Google's Big Data offerings.
dmead 4y ago
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%252Fwww.youtube.com%252Fuser%252FRedLetterMedia&keywords=aids&dateRange=all https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A%252F%...
- kellenmace 4y ago
  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!
  - dmead 4y ago
    no problem. here is a thread of people checking it out. https://www.reddit.com/r/RedLetterMedia/comments/uxoegh/every_mention_of_star_trek_in_a_red_letter_media/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedLetterMedia/comments/uxoegh/ever... it's considered funny when one of these movie reviewers calls something "aids" but it says it with a varying amount if "i"'sin the word. so it would be cool if we could find all the instances of rich evans being crass.
filoeleven 4y ago
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.
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Hey @filoeleven! Great- glad to hear you're finding it useful! Thanks for checking out my project! :)
dirtyid 4y ago
Fantastic. Somewhat related, friend use to had setup that automatically downloads YT subtitles, lowbit rate audio and video preview thumbnails to create searchable archive that doesn't use much space. Found it very useful for his studies but thumbnails wasn't great for slides.
sam1234apter 4y ago
make a filter for mentions vs description - many creators are cross linking other videos for users to checkout which are coming up in results Very useful website - thank you for the service

295 points by kellenmace 4y ago

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%252F%252Fwww.youtube.com%252Fc%252FTheVerge&keywords=MacBook%2520Pro&dateRange=3 https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A%252F%... If you follow that ^ link, then click the button to perform the search, you'll see all matching videos, with every single mention of "MacBook Pro" highlighted. My favorite part is that all the highlighted matches are timestamped. So you can click on any of them to jump to that exact moment in the video when that keyword was said! VideoMentions Search is great for these scenarios: - You want to find all videos within a YouTube channel that mention your brand, your product, or the topics you care about. - 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. - You run your own YouTube channel and want to quickly find the exact moments in your videos where you cover certain topics, so you can link others to that content. I have wanted a way to search YouTube based on spoken words for a while. I couldn't find a tool that provides that capability though, so I built it! I hope you find VideoMentions Search useful! I'd love to hear any feedback you have on it. Please let me know!

rodnim 4y ago
> - 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.
- Nowado 4y ago
  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.
  - kellenmace 4y ago
    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!
- kellenmace 4y ago
  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 notwithstanding, I still think it's a useful tool, though! Thanks for checking it out!
  - mistermann 4y ago
    Could you do a search based on their watch history if they have it enabled?
    - hanniabu 4y ago
      That'd certainly be useful
    - kellenmace 4y ago
      This is a cool idea! It wouldn't apply to people who want to search all the videos on a given channel for specific keywords (including those they haven't watched). I can see it being useful for folks trying to locate a specific video they remember watching in the past, though. One consideration is that getting the user's watch history would likely require calls to the YouTube API. So that means I would have to make this a paid service in order to offset the code of those API requests. The beautiful thing about the current iteration is that it doesn't rely on YouTube's API at all. By scraping YouTube pages and leveraging a few NPM packages, I'm currently able to offer free and unrestricted access to it. If enough people request that ability though, I'll consider incorporating it. Thanks for checking out my project and for the great idea!
jobigoud 4y ago
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 great complement to this as it works directly on the audio. [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Tercosmicqueen https://www.youtube.com/c/Tercosmicqueen
- kellenmace 4y ago
  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! :)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
corobo 4y ago
Very cool! Well done! I've not got a legit use for it right now but the few example searches I thought up returned the videos I was thinking of Nice work!
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Cool! Thank you! Here are some example use-cases that I included in another comment, in case any of them are relevant to you: 1. You want to find all videos within a YouTube channel that mention your brand, your product, or the topics you care about. 2. 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. 3. You run your own YouTube channel and want to quickly find the exact moments in your videos where you cover certain topics, so you can link others to that content. Maybe #2 happens occasionally? If so, maybe you can bookmark VideoMentions Search for just such an occasion :) In any event, thanks for checking out my project, and for the kind words!
  - corobo 4y ago
    Site's definitely bookmarked in my toolbox for sure! I imagine #2 will be my primary use case personally -- If not for me, to answer "Does anyone know the video where.." e: thinking about it I know a few people who pull highlights out of their older content (sort of #3). Shared with them :)
    - corobo 4y ago
      They loved it if you see any stats along the line of Scotland/UK + Discord referral haha
loxias 4y ago
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 unfortunately removes 90% of the utility)
- kellenmace 4y ago
  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!
  - loxias 4y ago
    > 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.
    - kellenmace 4y ago
CopOnTheRun 4y ago
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%252Fwww.youtube.com%252Fuser%252Faragusea&keywords=toxic&dateRange=all https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A%252F%... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3denP7wX2XU&t=296s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3denP7wX2XU&t=296s
- kellenmace 4y ago
  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!
  - tcmb 4y ago
    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 https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp [2] https://ramdass-search.net https://ramdass-search.net
barefeg 4y ago
Are the video transcripts searchable?
- kellenmace 4y ago
  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 https://kb.swtc.edu/page.php?id=90230
  - barefeg 4y ago
    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
    - kellenmace 4y ago
      Yeah, Google is of course the king of search, so they could certainly decide to revamp YouTube search to include spoken word/transcription matches. They have all the data required to make that happen. That would make VideoMentions Search irrelevant– and I'd be okay with that! In the meantime, I think this is a useful tool for quickly locating videos based on spoken words. Thanks for checking out my project!
Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
Congratulations on the launch! VideoMentions is addressing the need-gap: 'Searching YouTube videos with transcript'[1] posted on my problem validation forum. I appreciate that rather than just building a browser add-on to search individual video, You've built a business use case for brand monitoring. I hope you get profitable enough to afford the compute necessary to monitor top channels without having to explicitly mention them. You're welcomed to explain how it addresses that problem at needgap, So those who need it can find it easily. [1]: https://needgap.com/problems/88-searching-youtube-videos-with-transcript-youtube-transcript https://needgap.com/problems/88-searching-youtube-videos-wit...

truly 4y ago

Nice! Is it possible to do it without fixing the channel?

dankwizard 4y ago
I'm assuming it's using the API to download captions and scanning them, which is why it'd need the Channel. It would be so hard to know where to begin without it! Potentially future updates could search a logged in user's history?
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Yep, you're exactly right. The tool works by getting the channel's videos, then fetching the voice-to-text transcripts for them, then searching within the spoken words (along with the title and description) for any keyword matches. So there isn't a feasible way to do that across all of YouTube. I like your idea of searching the logged-in user's history! That could be handy. Another thing I've thought about is auto-importing all the channels they're subscribed to so they can search within those. For the first version of VideoMentions Search, I kept things simple with a single "Channel URL" input field, but using their history/subscriptions is totally doable. I'll see if there's enough demand for that. In any event, I still think that this simple first version has utility. I like being able to quickly pinpoint all the moments when a certain topic was mentioned across all of a channel's videos. Thanks so much for taking a look, and for your feedback!
  - fps_doug 4y ago
    Do you keep the transcripts around on the server? It shouldn't matter much in terms of storage unless the site becomes crazy popular, so you could offer a "best effort search" or something along the lines, that just searches everything you got so far, so the site would get better and better over time.
    - corobo 4y ago
      YouTube kills your API key if you do this and make the data available (eg via API). You're allowed to cache responses for a bit but not store them long term. "How would they know", etc of course, but if you're distributing the data they'll figure it out. Some smart cookies over there at Google. My small website managed to get on their radar and I didn't even post it to HN!

PaulKeeble 4y ago

One of the consequences of the effectiveness of click-bait titles on youtube is that searching for videos you watched historically is extremely difficult, because quite often the primary thing in the video is never mentioned in the title. The descriptions are almost universally used to store common links that are about the channel not the video and the consequence of this is that click-bait titled content is very hard to find after the fact. The other problem is quite a lot of channels are testing one title and then changing to another, the video wont then be found using the initial title and so even if you do remember elements of the title the channel may have made that impossible to use some hours or days later as another title with better performance was used. I can see a need for search in the contents of the videos but I don't want to specify the channel, I likely don't know especially since channels can also change their name.

Akronymus 4y ago
Also, the youtube built in search often fails to match videos that have a word in the title for which you search for.
- Minor49er 4y ago
  I can't even find a specific channel when I spell it correctly, even with double quotes. I have to go into the filters and specify channels-only, and even then it puts a bunch of wrong results in front of it. Their search on YouTube used to be better, showing results for what was actually searched for. But now it seems like they're trying to drive views to high-performing videos since they now give a single page of results for any query before backfilling the results with a bunch of suggestions that have nothing to do with the search
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    Up until a few days ago I had a redirect for search that fisabled the suggestions on the search page. Now, if I do that, the search only gives 1, irrelevant, result.
  - nonameiguess 4y ago

happy_pancake 4y ago

Nice! My friends and I had this idea for a hackathon and we won! We skipped lectures and we needed a way to fast forward to relevant parts of a lecture

kellenmace 4y ago
Cool @happy_pancake! Nice use-case! Is your project still online somewhere?

1970-01-01 4y ago

I wanted this just yesterday! I was searching several channels to recall how many bolts are holding the battery for the electric F150. Sure enough, Top Gear told me how many bolts the F150 used for its battery pack! Result: SPOKEN WORDS "…kept things simple it recycled the same basic chassis and attach the battery which can be removed with just eight bolts from underneath and used carryover components wherever possible in fact…"

kellenmace 4y ago
Nice! Perfect timing, then! Glad you're finding it useful! :)

baxuz 4y ago

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

kellenmace 4y ago
Hey @baxuz! Nice- I’m glad you like it! I hope it continues to come in handy. Thanks for checking out my project!

HAL9OOO 4y ago

Really useful tool! I watch a lot of cycling content and people do reviews of random products in the middle of videos, this helps narrow it down!

prg318 4y ago
s/reviews/paid promotions/

f0e4c2f7 4y ago

This is pretty amazing! Thank you for making it. I'm not sure if this would be against Google's terms so you might want to check: If you started indexing such that I could do a search and it would come back with any indexed content I think you would have invented a new search engine. Seems extremely useful. I already use YouTube this way today but as you pointed out searching by title can be tricky. Search engines supported by ads are also typically quite profitable.

anoncow 4y ago

How is this different from what Google currently does for in-video text search?

kellenmace 4y ago
Currently, YouTube does not reliably include spoken word/transcript matches in search results. You would have to manually open each individual video in a browser tab, open the transcript, hit cmd/ctrl+f and search for the words you're interested in. And if you need to search tens/hundreds/thousands of videos, that would take a very long time. VideoMentions Search allows you to specify the channel URL, keywords and date range, then does all that hard work for you, quickly locating all videos that contain those keywords. I hope that's helpful. Thanks for checking out my project!
- anoncow 4y ago
  Thank you for responding. This looks like a very cool project.

TuringNYC 4y ago

Dear @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?

kellenmace 4y ago
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.

ss108 4y ago

Very cool, seems useful.

kellenmace 4y ago
Thanks! Glad you think so. Thanks for checking it out!

HidyBush 4y ago

Are 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

cphoover 4y ago
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
- tomatowurst 4y ago
  I didn't know this...how do you show transcript?
  - kellenmace 4y ago
    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 https://kb.swtc.edu/page.php?id=90230
    - tomatowurst 4y ago
      This is so cool I had no idea this was possible I would often seek a particular segment manually. Thanks!
      - kellenmace 4y ago
        Welcome! :)
- kellenmace 4y ago
  I have come to the opposite conclusion - YouTube does not reliably include spoken word/transcript matches in search results. As I wrote in another comment, I've run tests where I open up the transcript of a video using these steps (https://kb.swtc.edu/page.php?id=90230 https://kb.swtc.edu/page.php?id=90230), copy a few of the words, then perform a search using those words across that channel, and the video I copied the words from doesn't appear on the list of results. 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!

nop_slide 4y ago

Nothing of note to say other than this is really cool!

kellenmace 4y ago
Thanks @nop_slide! Glad you dig it! Thanks for trying it out! :)

atentaten 4y ago

This is a nice tool. I wish one didn't have to specify the channel, as some comments mentioned. If it's not possible to get the channel when providing the video url via an API, it is possible to get it from the video url's GET response data. The latter may be little slower, but might be worth it in terms of UX.

kellenmace 4y ago
Hey @atentaten! YouTube doesn't provide a way to search across all of YouTube based on transcriptions/spoken words, unfortunately. That's why specifying a channel is required. Once the user provides a channel URL, then VideoMentions Search can perform an on-the-fly search of the videos on that channel to identify matches. Thanks for checking out my project!

lewisjoe 4y ago

Hi, 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

jonplackett 4y ago
Bump. Would like the lowdown too!
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Hey @jonplackett! as @alex_smart noticed in another comment, I am performing on-the-fly searches on the client. 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 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. I replied to @lewisjoe's comment above this one with some more details about tricks I'm employing to make searches fast. Thanks for checking out my project!
SteveDR 4y ago
I built something similar to this when I was first learning to program. Except mine lets you perform a one-time search for videos containing keywords, similar to how you would normally search YouTube. So there are no notifications or anything. https://phrasefinder.net https://phrasefinder.net I don’t know if it even works anymore and I’m sure the code is atrocious. But I remember that I would just scrape YouTube pages for video IDs, and then use an API that returned video captions for a given ID [1]. I could see how OP would do something similar. [1] https://pypi.org/project/youtube-transcript-api/ https://pypi.org/project/youtube-transcript-api/

mikewhy 4y ago

I've been wanting to make a supercut of Civvie 11 mentioning John Carmack but have been putting it off. This just did half the work for me, amazing!

kellenmace 4y ago
Nice! Glad to be of assistance :)

wenbin 4y ago

Great job! How do you do search result ranking? Any signals that you use to decide “this is a high quality video from reputable channel and it’s relevant”? I would imagine # of followers / likes / comments / like-comment ratio or the likes are used?

kellenmace 4y ago
Thank you! I don't do anything fancy at the moment. The matching videos are presented in reverse chronological order. So you'll see the most recent videos that contain the keywords at the top, then older video matches as you scroll down the page. And the user provides the URL of the single YouTube channel they want to search within. Thanks for checking out my project!

atleta 4y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/c/lexfridman

kellenmace 4y ago
Thanks for bringing this up, @atleta– I'll look into why that particular channel URL doesn't work.
pks016 4y ago
I tried with some other channels. Looks like It's not accepting all channels as valid urls.
- kellenmace 4y ago
  Hey @pks016 - if you recall a new channel URLs that didn't work, can you please reply with them? Then I can look into why and fix that bug. Thanks for checking out my project!

alpb 4y ago

FWIW Google already shows videos by their transcripts if the video has automatic captions or CC enabled in the Google search results. Try searching for a very specific phrase/sentence in quotes and it's likely you'll get the video in Google Search result page.

kellenmace 4y ago
I have found that this method is unreliable. If I run a Google search for "the "paradox of choice. You have so many choices, how do you know which one to pick? Even when I recommend to newer developers in the React", no YouTube video results are displayed, despite the fact that that exact string of text exists in the transcript of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQntFkK8Z54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQntFkK8Z54 That's why I built VideoMentions Search. It pulls in the transcript for every video within the channel and date range you selected and shows you any and all matches. Also - even when a Google search does work to find a video based on spoken words, all you're given is a link to that video's page. You can't see all the times that keyword was mentioned within the video and click on one of those mentions to jump to that exact moment in the video, like you can with VideoMentions Search. If Google/YouTube added those capabilities, then VideoMentions Search would be irrelevant. In the meantime though, I think it's a useful free tool for quickly finding spoken word matches within a specific channel. Thanks for checking it out!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kumarski 4y ago

Is this based on acoustic keyword recognition or SRT search?

kellenmace 4y ago
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!

ojiwan 4y ago

Pretty 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.

kellenmace 4y ago
Thanks @ojiwan! Yeah, that's precisely what the paid offering on the VideoMentions.com homepage is. It currently emails the user once for each matching video, but in the future, I could certainly add support for grouping them and sending weekly digests, like you're describing. Thanks for checking out my project!

dmead 4y ago

red letter media likes to talk about star trek https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.youtube.com%252Fuser%252FRedLetterMedia&keywords=star%2520trek&dateRange=all https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A%252F%...

kellenmace 4y ago
Haha- looks like it :)

wolongong942 4y ago

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".

kellenmace 4y ago
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 time" search on a channel with 2 million videos, your laptop fan may kick on while your browser works hard firing off thousand and thousands of requests until it's fetched all 2 million videos, you run out of memory, or you manually hit the "Cancel" button - whichever comes first :) Your regex idea is interesting, and I'll consider implementing some more complex rules like that if enough people request it. For now, my answer would be to either perform separate searches (like one for "yc" and another for "ycombinator"), or perform one search, then use ctrl/cmd+f to search within the matches displayed on the page. Thanks for checking out my project, and for the great feedback!
- messe 4y ago
  What're the (approximate) costs for monthly usage? (Or if you don't know yet: what're you budgeting for?)
  - kellenmace 4y ago
    Hey @messe! I built VideoMentions Search with a combination of custom code and a couple NPM packages that are able to scrape publicly accessible YouTube pages to get the channel and videos data the app relies on. So because it doesn't use the YouTube API at all, the total monthly cost is $0 :) That's why I'm able to offer free, unrestricted access to the tool and allow folks to perform unlimited searches. Thanks for checking out my project! I hope you find it useful!

galori 4y ago

This is neat, but I would like it to search against the entire archive of all youtube videos. I know you can't do that...but perhaps a Google employee making use of Google's Big Data offerings.

dmead 4y ago

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%252Fwww.youtube.com%252Fuser%252FRedLetterMedia&keywords=aids&dateRange=all https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A%252F%...

kellenmace 4y ago
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!
- dmead 4y ago
  no problem. here is a thread of people checking it out. https://www.reddit.com/r/RedLetterMedia/comments/uxoegh/every_mention_of_star_trek_in_a_red_letter_media/ https://www.reddit.com/r/RedLetterMedia/comments/uxoegh/ever... it's considered funny when one of these movie reviewers calls something "aids" but it says it with a varying amount if "i"'sin the word. so it would be cool if we could find all the instances of rich evans being crass.

filoeleven 4y ago

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.

kellenmace 4y ago
Hey @filoeleven! Great- glad to hear you're finding it useful! Thanks for checking out my project! :)

dirtyid 4y ago

Fantastic. Somewhat related, friend use to had setup that automatically downloads YT subtitles, lowbit rate audio and video preview thumbnails to create searchable archive that doesn't use much space. Found it very useful for his studies but thumbnails wasn't great for slides.

sam1234apter 4y ago

make a filter for mentions vs description - many creators are cross linking other videos for users to checkout which are coming up in results Very useful website - thank you for the service