17 ms·

To improve search results on YouTube, use the search prefix “intitle:”

358 points by normhill 4y ago

xnx 4y ago
In most cases, I'll take YouTube's default ranking, which might incorporate captioned text, comments, and other signals. Good to have this search operator as an option for specific uses.
thomassmith65 4y ago
If I had a magic wand, I'd create a non-profit, funded by the world's governments, to host the bulk of the world's videos. Wojcicki's Youtube doesn't care if when a user browses the site, it's like wading through a sea of garbage, as long as the user browses for as many hours as possible.
- ctoth 4y ago
  Didn't recognize the name, Googled her (CEO of YouTube), today is her birthday. Funny.
  - thomassmith65 4y ago
    Up until 2018, I used to joke that "Youtube is CEO-less." There were articles bemoaning Youtube's toxicity, but they never contained the word 'Wojcicki'. These days, the press sometimes – though still not often – mentions her name.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  Browsing YouTube without an AdBlocker and cosmetic filters that hide emblems and badges on the video player is truly shocking. I really sense the goal of YouTube isn’t to get you to watch something, it’s to get you to watch something else - at all times. I’ve seen it recommend related videos as soon as the video starts playing. It will recommend videos as soon as you click pause. There will be little interstitial recommendation overlays as it plays. How desperate must product managers at YouTube be to push this so strongly? Thankfully I crafted some filters to hide all of this, but it’s so user hostile that I feel bad for anyone that doesn’t know how to get rid of all this noise.
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    But hey, they removed those in video notes that were actually useful a lot of the times. Or community closed captioning. Or being able to disable that fucking miniplayer when you are in a playlist and navigate somewhere else. I have multiple tabs for a reason FFS.
BLO716 4y ago
Oh my, two posts where Google Dorking and #OSINT have found their way into posts. :) Love it!!! DefCon funzies abound on HN today. https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/cyber-security-tutorial/google-dorking https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/cyber-security-tutoria... Search Engine - "Google Dorking" like inurl: intitle: intext: etc. Also, google dorking has its "darkweb" side in forensics too. Enjoy. https://www.exploit-db.com/ https://www.exploit-db.com/
- brezelgoring 4y ago
  I found in the <"indexof:" include/> clue that our Social Sciences faculty is wide open, thanks!
post_break 4y ago
All I want is to be able to remove channels from my search, similar to removing pinterest from Google search.
- savanaly 4y ago
  It's not directly available in search but from the home page you can click the triple dot menu and click Don't recommend channel.
  - post_break 4y ago
    That doesn't remove a channel from search unfortunately.
    - hwers 4y ago
      I don’t even think it blocks the channel long term from your recommendations. I’m pretty sure they’ve tried to sneak in an old channel I’ve explicitly said not to recommend again in my recommendations via whatever multi armed bandit with noise algo they’re running.
      - Akronymus 4y ago
        I ended up adding more and more ublock origin block entries for each channel I REALLY want to avoid.
- davisoneee 4y ago
  For firefox users: Extension [1] gives a little 'X' beside the channel name in home and search, that can be used to completely remove that channel from all future searches. Similarly, remove a bunch of random distracting crap[2] such as 'related results'. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-cleaner/?utm_content=addons-manager-reviews-link&utm_medium=firefox-browser&utm_source=firefox-browser https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-clean... [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
slig 4y ago
YouTube's search is horrible. No, I don't want "related results" that are completely unrelated to my query, neither results from my country when I specifically type in English and my whole UI is in English and I never watch non-English content while logged in.
- davisoneee 4y ago
  Firefox plugin to remove distracting crap[2] such as 'related results' on search pages. [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
  - dmix 4y ago
    Thanks I tried it out and the setting is called "Hide Inapt Search Results" (it's on by default but it also disables recommendations everywhere by default so you might need to disable the other options).
  - arkitaip 4y ago
    If you use uBlock Origin you can remove most cruft by adding these rules to Settings > My filters: youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element youtube.com###hover-overlays youtube.com##yt-icon.ytd-badge-supported-renderer youtube.com###related youtube.com###donation-shelf
- bdowling 4y ago
  YouTube’s search is carefully optimized to keep viewers watching video after video, and ad after ad, for as long as possible. That’s why the search returns popular videos, ones that suck in viewers, rather than ones that match your search terms.
  - doliveira 4y ago
    I'm actually finding myself watching YouTube less and less because of this. If we were to anthropomorphize the AI, I'd say it's trying pretty desperately to bring me to a "popular cluster".
AlecSchueler 4y ago
This is great. Lately I've been learning to play traditional Irish music. Often I'll want to hear as many versions of a tune as I can; don't care if it's studio musicians, a session at a bar, or a few mates in their kitchen, as long as it includes the specified tune. What will often happen if I search, for example, "Monaghan Jig," is that I'll get a few results from famous albums and professional YouTube content creators, then a bunch of other jigs, The Hag At The Churn, Lark in The Morning etc. and they'll drown out videos with the actual jig I want. After that I have to experiment with variations like, "Monaghan Jig concertina," "Monaghan Jig pub session" etc to find the other videos YouTube's search had dismissed for me that indeed included "Monaghan Jig" in both the title and the content. With this operator I can hopefully save myself a lot of guesswork and frustration.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  I'm just glad that there's still an operator that isn't just ignored. I half suspect that this is a mistake and youtube will correct it quickly once word spreads.
jbay808 4y ago
While we're here, does YouTube search support date range specifiers? I sometimes want to find a video I remember being published in, say, 2014, but the title might be hard to search for or get buried under similar names. YouTube's UI filters only let me limit to some hard-coded ranges, all of which prioritize recent videos.
- groovybits 4y ago
  I found this site that has operators you can type in the search bar: https://seosly.com/youtube-search-operators/ https://seosly.com/youtube-search-operators/ Date operators: before:[date] after:[date] [search term], today [search term], last hour [search term], this month [search term], this year I tried the search: tesla, before:2019-01-02, after:2019-01-01 And it appeared to work like you'd expect. Edit: I'm not sure how intuitive the operators are. Ex: Combining them doesn't seem to give the expected results.
  - sergers 4y ago
    believe its your use of commas, need to use plus "+" tesla, before:2019-01-02 + after:2019-01-01 i came across another site that had a few more, https://granwehr.com/blog/youtube-search-operators#15-advanced-youtube-search-operators https://granwehr.com/blog/youtube-search-operators#15-advanc...
  - beachy 4y ago
    It's so weird to me how hard it is to find this sort of reference information. I experienced the same thing when looking for a definitive list of voice commands for Android auto. In the old days we carried around pocket sized cards with the full set of all possible instructions/ parameters. These days you have to search on Google, and then look at whichever ad-ridden hellhole has played the SEO game most effectively. That might have the answers, or it might be stale since it was originally copied and pasted from some other site long ago. Why doesn't YouTube provide this information themselves?
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  The date range filter of your search engine of choice, combined with 'site:youtube.com'. You also get the other behaviours of that search engine, though Google probably has the most complete index in this case. I've also tried the 'sort by oldest' programmed Google search that was posted here,[1] but its index seems to be missing many pages—youtube videos with few views in particular—compared to general Google. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31333436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31333436
clircle 4y ago
All search engines are bad now because search engines have turned into recommendation engines in the past 5-10 years.
- MrBlueIncognito 4y ago
  Sometimes these tangentially-related search results help people discover new things they would've otherwise missed out on. I believe striking a balance between recommendations and to-the-point results is necessary.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Every time I have specifically searched for something on youtube I have found it. But most of the time on youtube I don't actually have something specific in mind. I'm just looking for something interesting or educational and I want suggestions. I think they have been able to strike a really good balance between the use cases of directed searching and undirected consumption.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Search engines have always been recommendation engines.
mgdlbp 4y ago
Reminds me of this comment hinting at a search technique that the user doesn't want to say publicly lest YouTube remove it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630286 (What is it?? :P)
tmaly 4y ago
I would be curious to know what other advance search type keywords work in YouTube
Tijdreiziger 4y ago
Meta: It seems that HN lists the Punycode for this website's domain (xn--1-zfa.com), instead of the actual IDN that's displayed by the browser (ä1.com). This feels kind of odd to me. [Punycode] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode [IDN] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
- INTPenis 4y ago
  Depends on your view. People who wotk with DNS want to see the actual domain, while end users might prefer the translation.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    People who work with DNS know how to right-click and do “Copy Link”, or even to hover over a link and watch the status bar text.
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    Well, HN is a link aggregator, not a DNS tool.
- asciiresort 4y ago
  It poses a security risk and exploited to phish people. Modern Browsers sanitize punycode, not so sure about bespoke browsers that live inside other mobile apps
Llamamoe 4y ago
This is brilliant. I can't believe I haven't thought of it. I also recommend Distraction Free YouTube for blocking recommendations and (optionally) comments.
ok123456 4y ago
use yandex to search for youtube videos.
- Minor49er 4y ago
  Similar here. I often use Google itself to search for YouTube videos since the results aren't as immediately filled with random nonsense as with YouTube's own search
mxmilkiib 4y ago
Sort by upload date also cuts out semi-related results
withinboredom 4y ago
From watching with closed captions turned on. I can guess why their search is so terrible. Loud noises turns into closed captions (the ones generated by them) which probably gets indexed.
throwawaygog6 4y ago
While we are here, is there a service that provides me with list of newly uploaded youtube videos? In my mother tongue (south indian language), I have many interesting channels but youtube does not surface them by default. I just want to go through the list and write an algorithm to filter them out based on mypreferences. Is there somebody who scrapes them youtube and sells the data
- ttymck 4y ago
  Does the subscribe feature do what you are looking for?
  - throwawaygog6 4y ago
    Subscribe does not help me in discovering new channels on topics I want.
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    Subscribing doesn't show all videos, but only those that youtube thinks you may be interested in. If I get overwhelmed with content I can unsub to channels I no longer watch. Instead some sit in my subs list for years with regular uploads and never showing up in my sub list.
- kmfrk 4y ago
  You can still use https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={CHANNEL_ID} https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={CHANNEL... to pull up the RSS feed for a channel.
- gxqoz 4y ago
  I use NewPipe on Android and it has an option to show a chronological list of all new videos from all channels I'm subscribed to.
rhacker 4y ago
I did a youtube search for: attaching a prehung door and intitle: attaching a prehung door and the results are identical (for me at least). The results are also extremely relevant and concise in showing me how to install a prehung door. I am not really sure what people mean. Are people asking youtube to find videos that don't exist? like "how to make tritan plastic"
- sndean 4y ago
  I just did "tour de france 2022 stage 4" and "intitle: tour de france 2022 stage 4". For me the results are close but notably the first several results went from an average video length of ~4 minutes to ~40 minutes, including someone's two-hour-long stream. Maybe it really depends on what you're searching for. But I also rarely see many irrelevant results, including for this search.
- mbirth 4y ago
  If it works anything like with the plain Google search, the modifier only applies to text directly following the colon. E.g.: intitle:door will find all videos with "door" in their title. intitle:"prehung door" will find all videos where these two words in exactly that order are mentioned in the title. So to have it search for all words in the title, you'd have to do a search for: intitle:attaching intitle:a intitle:prehung intitle:door
  - mgdlbp 4y ago
    Or use, allintitle: attaching a prehung door But it seems that allintitle can only be used at the beginning of a query, so there's no way to combine it with non-title keywords. Engines supporting parentheses like Reddit's or Elasticsearch prevail here: title:(attaching a prehung door) But for some reason that doesn't work in Wikipedia's search, even though CirrusSearch is based on Elasticsearch.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  HN will often claim something is unusable and not what it used to be when the general public is quite happy with it and its working very well. I think it's more a bias against the wider product or company. HN users do not like YouTube and Google in general so any minor issue gets overblown while they would be quite happy to compile a new kernel to get PeerTube running.
toxik 4y ago
Is it possible to build a third party YouTube search by scraping a) YouTube and b) the user’s watch history? To me it seems like there’s some mid-to-low hanging fruit there. YT’s recommender fails to understand when a video is part of a series so often I almost have to think it’s intentional. Also recommending videos I’ve already watched in my homepage feed? What? What bugs me the most is that it wasn’t always this bad. Somebody changed it a couple of years ago.
- mtoner23 4y ago
  Certaily gotta be against youtube's TOS and it'll get shut down
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - corobo 4y ago
    Yup. You're allowed to cache for a short while but you're not allowed to store and serve source: My YouTube API key was blocked for this sort of thing shortly after GDPR came into effect
- mbirth 4y ago
  Invidious was such project, IIRC.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    ...and still is. Unfortunately it does not improve the search results either, because AFAIK it only proxies them from YT itself.
- matbatt38 4y ago
  https://github.com/tournesol-app/ https://github.com/tournesol-app/
jsemrau 4y ago
That's reallyhelpful. I am building youtube integration right now and noticed how the search results are really weird.
firebaze 4y ago
Brave search. Search for brave search, and you're back to when google was good. https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/ (Not affiliated with brave at all, just really impressed by their search engine)
upupandup 4y ago
what i would appreciate is if i could not see videos ive seen before twice. also the ability to search videos that is under a specific view count or likes that has bee uploaded between specific date ranges.
lajosbacs 4y ago
How I make youtube bearable: - subscribe through RSS only - block all 'related videos' boxes with the picker tool from ublock
- jacooper 4y ago
  Or just use Newpipe/Piped :).
  - mbirth 4y ago
    Or FreeTube
    - metadat 4y ago
      Or Vanced https://old.reddit.com/r/Vanced/comments/tdzmgw/other_how_to_install_and_use_vanced_postshutdown/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Vanced/comments/tdzmgw/other_how_to...
      - jacooper 4y ago
        I heard it stopped working lately?, A family member has it and it stopped working a few weeks ago, she had to revert to stock YouTube, and suddenly ads became the most annoying thing ever, lol.
- Valord 4y ago
  I am building a webapp that pulls YT subscriptions, lets you categorize them, and view videos by those categories. I have been using it daily for ~6 months instead of visiting YT directly. Considering finishing the last 20% and charging a small monthly fee in the $2-3 range. Not knowing how to find users for it has led to much procrastination.
random314 4y ago
The top results are typically copies of the original video you searched for, with padding to increase length of the video.
onetokeoverthe 4y ago
sam1r 4y ago
Nice domain. Renders well on safari, at least.
pigtailgirl 4y ago
-- often read a lot of complaints about youtube search, a gentle reminder of the scale: "YouTube hosts over 800 million videos among 37 million channels on the platform. 1 billion videos are watched per day on YouTube by its over 2 billion users." - it's a wonder youtube isn't serving up vast amounts of junk in search - using the filters they provide I'm always able to find multiple decent videos about whatever I'm looking for - out of 800 million - not awful imo --
- YetAnotherNick 4y ago
  Like literally google owns youtube and it has something like 100 times that scale. Text searching on 800m strings is a solved problem.
paulpauper 4y ago
I just want fewer ads. So many ads and sponsors. 10-15 second intro ads, then 10-second middle ads, and then ending ads. ANd then also sponsorship ads. I know there are extensions that can block some of these, but it's so aggravating too.
- jimjimjim 4y ago
  youtube premium is awesome. I can't recommend it enough.
  - addaon 4y ago
    I'm a YouTube Premium subscriber, but the one thing that would make me feel good about the subscription would be a way to block channels that show sponsored ads, even manually -- I pay money to avoid ads, and I understand that they can't, or choose not to, mark those videos that have ads anyway, but give me the tools to do it myself. (It looks like this might be possible in a browser, but Apple TV is my primary client, and the Apple TV app gets actively worse with each release...)
  - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
    I've been a YouTube premium subscribe for some number of years. I easily watch 10 to 15 hours or more of video on YouTube each month, probably per week. Plus YouTube Music makes it the best value streaming service I pay for.
  - thamer 4y ago
    Agreed. That said, YouTube Premium doesn't remove sponsor segments in videos, and these days many videos include a long segment about their sponsor of the day or their merch/patreon. For this, I've recently discovered the Chrome extension SponsorBlock[1], which relies on user-submitted segments to auto-skip all kinds of off-topic segments in the video. You can choose to keep, skip, or mute segments like intros, sponsor promo, subscription reminders, and more. This metadata is not available on every single video, but in my experience it has made a huge difference in the amount of ads and repetitive reminders I see. Many videos get segment updates very quickly. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-youtube/mnjggcdmjocbbbhaepdhchncahnbgone?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
oogabooga13 4y ago
I'm suprised to see that some say Youtube's search is bad. I often find myself wishing that that I could get a youtube level of accuracy in my Google searches. I don't usually scroll to find the result I'm looking for. I tend to find the big view and small view videos with the same level ease. *Also a premium subscriber. Youtube in many ways is a necessary part of this version of the internet experience and I detest having to sit through all the ads...if I have to pay $10/month seems fair to me. Just my 02 cents.
- i_have_an_idea 4y ago
  The search is usually pretty good to surface the top few results. But the use case I have, that seems to consistently work poorly, is when I'm looking for all videos that contain a certain person and search by name. In these cases, YouTube shows you the top few results (which are typically the most viewed clips that match the query), then it shows you "related" videos (which typically don't contain that person at all), then it shows you videos that you have previously watched (I don't understand why). Eventually, if you keep scrolling down, you get another few batches of results ranked in the same way and potentially you might get all the relevant results. It's just quite hard to do so.
capybara_2020 4y ago
Wait you can "improve" youtube search. It is totally broken for me. A lot of search queries give 90% of the results from 2 or 3 channels. If that is not the case, the results return almost the exact same results as what I got a few months back even though I know there is a ton of new content. Youtube seems to put me in a box and there is no way out. I had to ditch youtube for spotify to get new music. Youtube seems to have become unusable unless you know the exact channel or video you want to watch.
boredemployee 4y ago
internet is over. everything is filled with BS.
hexage1814 4y ago
Related topic, this site allows you to search on youtube video subtitles: https://filmot.com https://filmot.com
cnixon1234 4y ago
If anyone has similar tips for improving the search function of Amazon (shopping, not AWS) I'd be really interested in that as well. The search is so bad that I usually get better results by dorking with Google.
synaesthesisx 4y ago
To improve search results on Google, append site:reddit.com to your query :)
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  It's crazy how often I find myself doing this. The results returned still aren't always amazing but it pretty consistently massively improves signal-to-noise.
- beebeepka 4y ago
  What good would that be if I am not interested in visiting that site? What an odd suggestion
  - 8organicbits 4y ago
    The point is to force Google towards a site you expect may have the result you want. site:news.ycombinator.com works for similar reasons. Basically, you can find (likely organic) discussion of topics by groups who are familiar with the subject and are likely to quickly correct any incorrect or misleading statements. Otherwise, Google will believe that some no-name site with generated content is... somehow... a good search result. The 'reddit' approach works poorly for me recently, Google gets stuck in certain sub-reddits and there's a lot of low quality or bot content on reddit to filter out anyway.
- baxuz 4y ago
  Google's search is amazingly stupid as of late. For the query "monkeypox gym" I'm getting COVID-19 results. For the query "social network without kids" I'm getting results for social networks aimed at kids. For the query "cakes without strawberries" I'm getting... This: https://imgur.com/a/Os1kkcP https://imgur.com/a/Os1kkcP
  - RugnirViking 4y ago
    while those are pretty ridiculous examples that google should definately handle better, the cake one can be effectively done as "cakes -strawberries"
beebeepka 4y ago
It's getting out of control. I think I am going to bail soon. Ads every few seconds, queries that do not match my input, crazy suggestions. It's actually worse than TV and magazines ffs.
frays 4y ago
Useful tip and website, thanks.
tweakimp 4y ago
I need better filters in the search. I want to search and then filter by views and sort by time, why is that not possible :(
tawhk 4y ago
Exact term doesn't work.

358 points by normhill 4y ago

xnx 4y ago

In most cases, I'll take YouTube's default ranking, which might incorporate captioned text, comments, and other signals. Good to have this search operator as an option for specific uses.

thomassmith65 4y ago

If I had a magic wand, I'd create a non-profit, funded by the world's governments, to host the bulk of the world's videos. Wojcicki's Youtube doesn't care if when a user browses the site, it's like wading through a sea of garbage, as long as the user browses for as many hours as possible.

ctoth 4y ago
Didn't recognize the name, Googled her (CEO of YouTube), today is her birthday. Funny.
- thomassmith65 4y ago
  Up until 2018, I used to joke that "Youtube is CEO-less." There were articles bemoaning Youtube's toxicity, but they never contained the word 'Wojcicki'. These days, the press sometimes – though still not often – mentions her name.
BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
Browsing YouTube without an AdBlocker and cosmetic filters that hide emblems and badges on the video player is truly shocking. I really sense the goal of YouTube isn’t to get you to watch something, it’s to get you to watch something else - at all times. I’ve seen it recommend related videos as soon as the video starts playing. It will recommend videos as soon as you click pause. There will be little interstitial recommendation overlays as it plays. How desperate must product managers at YouTube be to push this so strongly? Thankfully I crafted some filters to hide all of this, but it’s so user hostile that I feel bad for anyone that doesn’t know how to get rid of all this noise.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  But hey, they removed those in video notes that were actually useful a lot of the times. Or community closed captioning. Or being able to disable that fucking miniplayer when you are in a playlist and navigate somewhere else. I have multiple tabs for a reason FFS.

BLO716 4y ago

Oh my, two posts where Google Dorking and #OSINT have found their way into posts. :) Love it!!! DefCon funzies abound on HN today. https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/cyber-security-tutorial/google-dorking https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/cyber-security-tutoria... Search Engine - "Google Dorking" like inurl: intitle: intext: etc. Also, google dorking has its "darkweb" side in forensics too. Enjoy. https://www.exploit-db.com/ https://www.exploit-db.com/

brezelgoring 4y ago
I found in the <"indexof:" include/> clue that our Social Sciences faculty is wide open, thanks!

post_break 4y ago

All I want is to be able to remove channels from my search, similar to removing pinterest from Google search.

savanaly 4y ago
It's not directly available in search but from the home page you can click the triple dot menu and click Don't recommend channel.
- post_break 4y ago
  That doesn't remove a channel from search unfortunately.
  - hwers 4y ago
    I don’t even think it blocks the channel long term from your recommendations. I’m pretty sure they’ve tried to sneak in an old channel I’ve explicitly said not to recommend again in my recommendations via whatever multi armed bandit with noise algo they’re running.
    - Akronymus 4y ago
      I ended up adding more and more ublock origin block entries for each channel I REALLY want to avoid.
davisoneee 4y ago
For firefox users: Extension [1] gives a little 'X' beside the channel name in home and search, that can be used to completely remove that channel from all future searches. Similarly, remove a bunch of random distracting crap[2] such as 'related results'. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-cleaner/?utm_content=addons-manager-reviews-link&utm_medium=firefox-browser&utm_source=firefox-browser https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-clean... [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...

slig 4y ago

YouTube's search is horrible. No, I don't want "related results" that are completely unrelated to my query, neither results from my country when I specifically type in English and my whole UI is in English and I never watch non-English content while logged in.

davisoneee 4y ago
Firefox plugin to remove distracting crap[2] such as 'related results' on search pages. [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
- dmix 4y ago
  Thanks I tried it out and the setting is called "Hide Inapt Search Results" (it's on by default but it also disables recommendations everywhere by default so you might need to disable the other options).
- arkitaip 4y ago
  If you use uBlock Origin you can remove most cruft by adding these rules to Settings > My filters: youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element youtube.com###hover-overlays youtube.com##yt-icon.ytd-badge-supported-renderer youtube.com###related youtube.com###donation-shelf
bdowling 4y ago
YouTube’s search is carefully optimized to keep viewers watching video after video, and ad after ad, for as long as possible. That’s why the search returns popular videos, ones that suck in viewers, rather than ones that match your search terms.
- doliveira 4y ago
  I'm actually finding myself watching YouTube less and less because of this. If we were to anthropomorphize the AI, I'd say it's trying pretty desperately to bring me to a "popular cluster".

AlecSchueler 4y ago

This is great. Lately I've been learning to play traditional Irish music. Often I'll want to hear as many versions of a tune as I can; don't care if it's studio musicians, a session at a bar, or a few mates in their kitchen, as long as it includes the specified tune. What will often happen if I search, for example, "Monaghan Jig," is that I'll get a few results from famous albums and professional YouTube content creators, then a bunch of other jigs, The Hag At The Churn, Lark in The Morning etc. and they'll drown out videos with the actual jig I want. After that I have to experiment with variations like, "Monaghan Jig concertina," "Monaghan Jig pub session" etc to find the other videos YouTube's search had dismissed for me that indeed included "Monaghan Jig" in both the title and the content. With this operator I can hopefully save myself a lot of guesswork and frustration.

jjoonathan 4y ago
I'm just glad that there's still an operator that isn't just ignored. I half suspect that this is a mistake and youtube will correct it quickly once word spreads.

jbay808 4y ago

While we're here, does YouTube search support date range specifiers? I sometimes want to find a video I remember being published in, say, 2014, but the title might be hard to search for or get buried under similar names. YouTube's UI filters only let me limit to some hard-coded ranges, all of which prioritize recent videos.

groovybits 4y ago
I found this site that has operators you can type in the search bar: https://seosly.com/youtube-search-operators/ https://seosly.com/youtube-search-operators/ Date operators: before:[date] after:[date] [search term], today [search term], last hour [search term], this month [search term], this year I tried the search: tesla, before:2019-01-02, after:2019-01-01 And it appeared to work like you'd expect. Edit: I'm not sure how intuitive the operators are. Ex: Combining them doesn't seem to give the expected results.
- sergers 4y ago
  believe its your use of commas, need to use plus "+" tesla, before:2019-01-02 + after:2019-01-01 i came across another site that had a few more, https://granwehr.com/blog/youtube-search-operators#15-advanced-youtube-search-operators https://granwehr.com/blog/youtube-search-operators#15-advanc...
- beachy 4y ago
  It's so weird to me how hard it is to find this sort of reference information. I experienced the same thing when looking for a definitive list of voice commands for Android auto. In the old days we carried around pocket sized cards with the full set of all possible instructions/ parameters. These days you have to search on Google, and then look at whichever ad-ridden hellhole has played the SEO game most effectively. That might have the answers, or it might be stale since it was originally copied and pasted from some other site long ago. Why doesn't YouTube provide this information themselves?
mgdlbp 4y ago
The date range filter of your search engine of choice, combined with 'site:youtube.com'. You also get the other behaviours of that search engine, though Google probably has the most complete index in this case. I've also tried the 'sort by oldest' programmed Google search that was posted here,[1] but its index seems to be missing many pages—youtube videos with few views in particular—compared to general Google. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31333436 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31333436

clircle 4y ago

All search engines are bad now because search engines have turned into recommendation engines in the past 5-10 years.

MrBlueIncognito 4y ago
Sometimes these tangentially-related search results help people discover new things they would've otherwise missed out on. I believe striking a balance between recommendations and to-the-point results is necessary.
Gigachad 4y ago
Every time I have specifically searched for something on youtube I have found it. But most of the time on youtube I don't actually have something specific in mind. I'm just looking for something interesting or educational and I want suggestions. I think they have been able to strike a really good balance between the use cases of directed searching and undirected consumption.
charcircuit 4y ago
Search engines have always been recommendation engines.

mgdlbp 4y ago

Reminds me of this comment hinting at a search technique that the user doesn't want to say publicly lest YouTube remove it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30630286 (What is it?? :P)

tmaly 4y ago

I would be curious to know what other advance search type keywords work in YouTube

Tijdreiziger 4y ago

Meta: It seems that HN lists the Punycode for this website's domain (xn--1-zfa.com), instead of the actual IDN that's displayed by the browser (ä1.com). This feels kind of odd to me. [Punycode] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode [IDN] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name

INTPenis 4y ago
Depends on your view. People who wotk with DNS want to see the actual domain, while end users might prefer the translation.
- teddyh 4y ago
  People who work with DNS know how to right-click and do “Copy Link”, or even to hover over a link and watch the status bar text.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  Well, HN is a link aggregator, not a DNS tool.
asciiresort 4y ago
It poses a security risk and exploited to phish people. Modern Browsers sanitize punycode, not so sure about bespoke browsers that live inside other mobile apps

Llamamoe 4y ago

This is brilliant. I can't believe I haven't thought of it. I also recommend Distraction Free YouTube for blocking recommendations and (optionally) comments.

ok123456 4y ago

use yandex to search for youtube videos.

Minor49er 4y ago
Similar here. I often use Google itself to search for YouTube videos since the results aren't as immediately filled with random nonsense as with YouTube's own search

mxmilkiib 4y ago

Sort by upload date also cuts out semi-related results

withinboredom 4y ago

From watching with closed captions turned on. I can guess why their search is so terrible. Loud noises turns into closed captions (the ones generated by them) which probably gets indexed.

throwawaygog6 4y ago

While we are here, is there a service that provides me with list of newly uploaded youtube videos? In my mother tongue (south indian language), I have many interesting channels but youtube does not surface them by default. I just want to go through the list and write an algorithm to filter them out based on mypreferences. Is there somebody who scrapes them youtube and sells the data

ttymck 4y ago
Does the subscribe feature do what you are looking for?
- throwawaygog6 4y ago
  Subscribe does not help me in discovering new channels on topics I want.
- Akronymus 4y ago
  Subscribing doesn't show all videos, but only those that youtube thinks you may be interested in. If I get overwhelmed with content I can unsub to channels I no longer watch. Instead some sit in my subs list for years with regular uploads and never showing up in my sub list.
kmfrk 4y ago
You can still use https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={CHANNEL_ID} https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id={CHANNEL... to pull up the RSS feed for a channel.
gxqoz 4y ago
I use NewPipe on Android and it has an option to show a chronological list of all new videos from all channels I'm subscribed to.

rhacker 4y ago

I did a youtube search for: attaching a prehung door and intitle: attaching a prehung door and the results are identical (for me at least). The results are also extremely relevant and concise in showing me how to install a prehung door. I am not really sure what people mean. Are people asking youtube to find videos that don't exist? like "how to make tritan plastic"

sndean 4y ago
I just did "tour de france 2022 stage 4" and "intitle: tour de france 2022 stage 4". For me the results are close but notably the first several results went from an average video length of ~4 minutes to ~40 minutes, including someone's two-hour-long stream. Maybe it really depends on what you're searching for. But I also rarely see many irrelevant results, including for this search.
mbirth 4y ago
If it works anything like with the plain Google search, the modifier only applies to text directly following the colon. E.g.: intitle:door will find all videos with "door" in their title. intitle:"prehung door" will find all videos where these two words in exactly that order are mentioned in the title. So to have it search for all words in the title, you'd have to do a search for: intitle:attaching intitle:a intitle:prehung intitle:door
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  Or use, allintitle: attaching a prehung door But it seems that allintitle can only be used at the beginning of a query, so there's no way to combine it with non-title keywords. Engines supporting parentheses like Reddit's or Elasticsearch prevail here: title:(attaching a prehung door) But for some reason that doesn't work in Wikipedia's search, even though CirrusSearch is based on Elasticsearch.
Gigachad 4y ago
HN will often claim something is unusable and not what it used to be when the general public is quite happy with it and its working very well. I think it's more a bias against the wider product or company. HN users do not like YouTube and Google in general so any minor issue gets overblown while they would be quite happy to compile a new kernel to get PeerTube running.

toxik 4y ago

Is it possible to build a third party YouTube search by scraping a) YouTube and b) the user’s watch history? To me it seems like there’s some mid-to-low hanging fruit there. YT’s recommender fails to understand when a video is part of a series so often I almost have to think it’s intentional. Also recommending videos I’ve already watched in my homepage feed? What? What bugs me the most is that it wasn’t always this bad. Somebody changed it a couple of years ago.

mtoner23 4y ago
Certaily gotta be against youtube's TOS and it'll get shut down
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- corobo 4y ago
  Yup. You're allowed to cache for a short while but you're not allowed to store and serve source: My YouTube API key was blocked for this sort of thing shortly after GDPR came into effect
mbirth 4y ago
Invidious was such project, IIRC.
- userbinator 4y ago
  ...and still is. Unfortunately it does not improve the search results either, because AFAIK it only proxies them from YT itself.
matbatt38 4y ago
https://github.com/tournesol-app/ https://github.com/tournesol-app/

jsemrau 4y ago

That's reallyhelpful. I am building youtube integration right now and noticed how the search results are really weird.

firebaze 4y ago

Brave search. Search for brave search, and you're back to when google was good. https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/ (Not affiliated with brave at all, just really impressed by their search engine)

upupandup 4y ago

what i would appreciate is if i could not see videos ive seen before twice. also the ability to search videos that is under a specific view count or likes that has bee uploaded between specific date ranges.

lajosbacs 4y ago

How I make youtube bearable: - subscribe through RSS only - block all 'related videos' boxes with the picker tool from ublock

jacooper 4y ago
Or just use Newpipe/Piped :).
- mbirth 4y ago
  Or FreeTube
  - metadat 4y ago
    Or Vanced https://old.reddit.com/r/Vanced/comments/tdzmgw/other_how_to_install_and_use_vanced_postshutdown/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Vanced/comments/tdzmgw/other_how_to...
    - jacooper 4y ago
      I heard it stopped working lately?, A family member has it and it stopped working a few weeks ago, she had to revert to stock YouTube, and suddenly ads became the most annoying thing ever, lol.
Valord 4y ago
I am building a webapp that pulls YT subscriptions, lets you categorize them, and view videos by those categories. I have been using it daily for ~6 months instead of visiting YT directly. Considering finishing the last 20% and charging a small monthly fee in the $2-3 range. Not knowing how to find users for it has led to much procrastination.

random314 4y ago

The top results are typically copies of the original video you searched for, with padding to increase length of the video.

onetokeoverthe 4y ago

sam1r 4y ago

Nice domain. Renders well on safari, at least.

pigtailgirl 4y ago

-- often read a lot of complaints about youtube search, a gentle reminder of the scale: "YouTube hosts over 800 million videos among 37 million channels on the platform. 1 billion videos are watched per day on YouTube by its over 2 billion users." - it's a wonder youtube isn't serving up vast amounts of junk in search - using the filters they provide I'm always able to find multiple decent videos about whatever I'm looking for - out of 800 million - not awful imo --

YetAnotherNick 4y ago
Like literally google owns youtube and it has something like 100 times that scale. Text searching on 800m strings is a solved problem.

paulpauper 4y ago

I just want fewer ads. So many ads and sponsors. 10-15 second intro ads, then 10-second middle ads, and then ending ads. ANd then also sponsorship ads. I know there are extensions that can block some of these, but it's so aggravating too.

jimjimjim 4y ago
youtube premium is awesome. I can't recommend it enough.
- addaon 4y ago
  I'm a YouTube Premium subscriber, but the one thing that would make me feel good about the subscription would be a way to block channels that show sponsored ads, even manually -- I pay money to avoid ads, and I understand that they can't, or choose not to, mark those videos that have ads anyway, but give me the tools to do it myself. (It looks like this might be possible in a browser, but Apple TV is my primary client, and the Apple TV app gets actively worse with each release...)
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
  I've been a YouTube premium subscribe for some number of years. I easily watch 10 to 15 hours or more of video on YouTube each month, probably per week. Plus YouTube Music makes it the best value streaming service I pay for.
- thamer 4y ago
  Agreed. That said, YouTube Premium doesn't remove sponsor segments in videos, and these days many videos include a long segment about their sponsor of the day or their merch/patreon. For this, I've recently discovered the Chrome extension SponsorBlock[1], which relies on user-submitted segments to auto-skip all kinds of off-topic segments in the video. You can choose to keep, skip, or mute segments like intros, sponsor promo, subscription reminders, and more. This metadata is not available on every single video, but in my experience it has made a huge difference in the amount of ads and repetitive reminders I see. Many videos get segment updates very quickly. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-youtube/mnjggcdmjocbbbhaepdhchncahnbgone?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...

oogabooga13 4y ago

I'm suprised to see that some say Youtube's search is bad. I often find myself wishing that that I could get a youtube level of accuracy in my Google searches. I don't usually scroll to find the result I'm looking for. I tend to find the big view and small view videos with the same level ease. *Also a premium subscriber. Youtube in many ways is a necessary part of this version of the internet experience and I detest having to sit through all the ads...if I have to pay $10/month seems fair to me. Just my 02 cents.

i_have_an_idea 4y ago
The search is usually pretty good to surface the top few results. But the use case I have, that seems to consistently work poorly, is when I'm looking for all videos that contain a certain person and search by name. In these cases, YouTube shows you the top few results (which are typically the most viewed clips that match the query), then it shows you "related" videos (which typically don't contain that person at all), then it shows you videos that you have previously watched (I don't understand why). Eventually, if you keep scrolling down, you get another few batches of results ranked in the same way and potentially you might get all the relevant results. It's just quite hard to do so.

capybara_2020 4y ago

Wait you can "improve" youtube search. It is totally broken for me. A lot of search queries give 90% of the results from 2 or 3 channels. If that is not the case, the results return almost the exact same results as what I got a few months back even though I know there is a ton of new content. Youtube seems to put me in a box and there is no way out. I had to ditch youtube for spotify to get new music. Youtube seems to have become unusable unless you know the exact channel or video you want to watch.

boredemployee 4y ago

internet is over. everything is filled with BS.

hexage1814 4y ago

Related topic, this site allows you to search on youtube video subtitles: https://filmot.com https://filmot.com

cnixon1234 4y ago

If anyone has similar tips for improving the search function of Amazon (shopping, not AWS) I'd be really interested in that as well. The search is so bad that I usually get better results by dorking with Google.

synaesthesisx 4y ago

To improve search results on Google, append site:reddit.com to your query :)

kitsunesoba 4y ago
It's crazy how often I find myself doing this. The results returned still aren't always amazing but it pretty consistently massively improves signal-to-noise.
beebeepka 4y ago
What good would that be if I am not interested in visiting that site? What an odd suggestion
- 8organicbits 4y ago
  The point is to force Google towards a site you expect may have the result you want. site:news.ycombinator.com works for similar reasons. Basically, you can find (likely organic) discussion of topics by groups who are familiar with the subject and are likely to quickly correct any incorrect or misleading statements. Otherwise, Google will believe that some no-name site with generated content is... somehow... a good search result. The 'reddit' approach works poorly for me recently, Google gets stuck in certain sub-reddits and there's a lot of low quality or bot content on reddit to filter out anyway.
baxuz 4y ago
Google's search is amazingly stupid as of late. For the query "monkeypox gym" I'm getting COVID-19 results. For the query "social network without kids" I'm getting results for social networks aimed at kids. For the query "cakes without strawberries" I'm getting... This: https://imgur.com/a/Os1kkcP https://imgur.com/a/Os1kkcP
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  while those are pretty ridiculous examples that google should definately handle better, the cake one can be effectively done as "cakes -strawberries"

beebeepka 4y ago

It's getting out of control. I think I am going to bail soon. Ads every few seconds, queries that do not match my input, crazy suggestions. It's actually worse than TV and magazines ffs.

frays 4y ago

Useful tip and website, thanks.

tweakimp 4y ago

I need better filters in the search. I want to search and then filter by views and sort by time, why is that not possible :(

tawhk 4y ago

Exact term doesn't work.