11 ms·

Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters

325 points by nevernothing 6mo ago

dev1ycan 6mo ago
This is just adding the hidden filters such as before:[date]: Finds videos uploaded before a specific date. Example: space exploration before:2020-01-01 after:[date]: Finds videos uploaded after a specific date. Example: tech news after:2024-01-01 To an UI, right?
- throw_m239339 6mo ago
  As long I doesn't shove "shorts" or "other people watched" in the result list, it's an improvement. Sometimes the results are so egregious and completely unrelated to the search terms that I feel like youtube wants to piss me off on purpose. I don't want to be searching some quantum physics video and get videos of some barely clothed women in Miami, I fail to see how it is related...
  - tremarley 6mo ago
    Enshittification is the reason
- awesome_dude 6mo ago
  I think that it's a fair title - it takes the "hidden" search terms and brings them to the surface for users. The (default) YouTube search is barely useful They have made a search WITH the advanced features available Everything as advertised (IMO)
- bryanhogan 6mo ago
  One of the problems with YouTube seach is that they also stop showing you what you searched for after a couple of videos, instead you get the same crap you find on the homepage, which is bewildering.
  - bilegeek 6mo ago
    Can't remember where I got them, but there's some uBO rules that really help on that front: youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer.style-scope:has(span:has-text(/Related to your search/i)) youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer.style-scope:has(span:has-text(/Related to your searches/i)) youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer.style-scope:has(span:has-text(/From related searches/i)) youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/People also watched/) youtube.com###contents > ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/For you/) youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer.style-scope:has(span:has-text(/Watch again/i)) youtube.com##ytd-horizontal-card-list-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:has(span:has-text(/Searches related to/i)) youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer.style-scope:has(span:has-text(/Learn while you\'re at home/i)) youtube.com##ytd-horizontal-card-list-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope youtube.com###secondary > .ytd-two-column-search-results-renderer youtube.com###contents > .ytd-secondary-search-container-renderer.style-scope youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/Previously watched/) Also got some other rules from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44332976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44332976 This all shouldn't be necessary, but alas...
- prophesi 6mo ago
  One of the first things I do on a new device is install an extension to expose these hidden filters, and to hide recommended videos + redirect the homepage to the subscriptions tab.
  - cure_42 6mo ago
    What extension exposes the hidden filters???
    - prophesi 6mo ago
      You could probably vibe-code it if it doesn't exist. You're literally just adding extra parameters to the search request. Hard part is creating the interface for it. Saw more options looking for Firefox extensions than Chrome for this, though that might be expected.
      - lucb1e 6mo ago
        > One of the first things I do on a new device is install an extension to ... < [which one] > vibe-code it if it doesn't exist So it doesn't exist? I don't understand what I'm reading. (Plus the suggestion to create more slopware)
        prophesi 6mo ago
        > You're literally just adding extra parameters to the search request > Saw more options looking for Firefox extensions than Chrome for this, though that might be expected. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough in my comment that it's a very trivial feature. Would you want a lmgtfy link instead? edit: The irony that this very submission is probably AI generated? There's no link to their source code, and there's a tab titled "AI Generator" for AI generated playlists?
        tredre3 6mo ago
        I think there's been a break in this conversation somewhere. You said: One of the first things I do on a new device is install an extension to expose these hidden filters Someone asked you to name the extension. Then you go on saying it's easy to vibe code and you're not here to hold hands? Okay, so does the extension exist or not?
- nevernothing 6mo ago
  You're basically right, it's just a UI for the old search filters, at least for the ones that still work today.
atum47 6mo ago
I'm not popular enough to write a post about everything that is wrong with YouTube, from recommending the same few videos over and over again in different "categories" to ALL the results of a search being cringe shorts no one wants to see.
- jeffbee 6mo ago
  I know it's really really loud in your echo chamber but short form videos are extremely popular.
  - mech422 6mo ago
    He didn't say they weren't ? He said youtube keeps recommending 'cringe' shorts no-one wants to see. I can sympathize with him - I have the youtube recommends the same 4 videos over and over again in multiple categories issue, and the 'lots of shorts I don't care about issue'. Though, shorts at least get refreshed/rotated more often then the stupid suggestions.
- owlboy 6mo ago
  I desperately want someone to interview someone at YouTube and directly ask about this bullshit and get them to say it’s all in the name of increasing watch time at all costs.
- atum47 6mo ago
  https://anonmp4.help/v/SCBI4QBrglJIZix https://anonmp4.help/v/SCBI4QBrglJIZix See if you can count how many times the video "where do video games come from" appears in my front page.
wincy 6mo ago
For April Fools Sega released an (actual, real) “Sanic the Hedgeheg” t-shirt and I wanted to see if there was anything about it on YouTube. YouTube assumed I meant “sonic” and it was impossible to correct it and say “no I’m actually searching for this dumb meme”. It just assumes everyone who uses YouTube is really dumb I guess. (I bought the shirt by the way and am excited to get it lol)
- msephton 6mo ago
  Just put the term in quotes "sanic the hedgeheg" ignore the suggestions and press enter to see the real results.
  - thfuran 6mo ago
    Google no longer cares much about quotes. Sometimes it’ll take them seriously and sometimes not.
    - lelandfe 6mo ago
      For instance, searching the quoted (random phrase) "pants butler" produces first page results like: "pants,” Butler" and "pants...Butler" and "Pants - Butler's" Second page loses it entirely, with results like "BUTLER SVC Green Back Country Cargo Pants" and another that seemingly lacks "butler" anywhere on the page.
      - iamnothere 6mo ago
        I have also noticed this. Many other search engines have started doing it too. If I had to guess, they are probably deferring to autocorrect if a quoted search doesn’t appear often enough to be notable and the distance to existing common tokens is small. This really sucks, because it means that you can’t search for uncommon things that are named similarly to common terms. Once upon a time it wasn’t like this. A similar problem comes up if you want to clarify a common search with an uncommon term, like (made up example here) “German castle Tokyo”. Once upon a time you could quote the uncommon term or prefix it with a plus to force a narrowing of the results. This could find discussions or specific posts with unusual combinations of words, which was great when you knew were looking for something very specific and obscure. Now this hardly ever works, and instead they just ignore your extra term. Sometimes the search engine “AI assistants” can find these things if you prompt correctly, which is maybe the most useful application of AI that I’ve found. But even then they often don’t seem to search that deeply, and often they will just assume that your query is invalid and gaslight you.
VenezuelaFree 6mo ago
Search is the reason I stopped watching youtube, I used to view and discover so many nice stuff in there, tutorials, new hobbies, new music, new creators with different interests, etc but now it's pretty much impossible to find, you are forced to watch the 3 top videos, some 3 ads and then it forces you to watch some other random unrelated crap, it's so annoying and frustrating It got so bad that even searching the full tittle of the video doesnt show you that video haha
- gsky 6mo ago
  on top of that it pushes worst creators (who are the biggest thanks to yt) content.
  - The_Goonies1985 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - Red_or_Blue 6mo ago
    [dead]
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- tyrust 6mo ago
  > you are forced to watch the 3 top videos, some 3 ads and then it forces you to watch some other random unrelated crap, it's so annoying and frustrating Brother, you are the one choosing the videos.
  - wswope 6mo ago
    Exactly the sort of user hostility I’d expect from a google employee. Shameful. Maybe if practical tools such as like-ratios were in place users could sort good content from bad.
    - tyrust 6mo ago
ddtaylor 6mo ago
If anyone has a good solution to YouTube destroying all value of the Subscriptions page I am open ears. Until recently my consumption of YT was basically to go to my subscriptions page and see what new content had been released since I last watched YT.
- atomicfiredoll 6mo ago
  Things like FreeTube and NewPipe let you keep a subscription list, even if you watch the videos elsewhere. Using them can be a pain with the whole cat and mouse thing, but at least it's something (for now... I wouldn't be shocked if google was partially gunning for projects like NewPipe specifically with the Android app installation changes.)
- loveparade 6mo ago
  You could manage your subscriptions in an RSS reader, that's what I used to do. Each channel has multiple RSS feeds associated with it for different types of videos (live, vod, etc).
- jeffbee 6mo ago
  That's ... exactly what the subscriptions feed does right now?
  - ddtaylor 6mo ago
    The subscriptions page was changed about a month ago. It now shows the videos in the top as "Relevant", which includes a list of videos from the ~12 days that are being suggested to you. After that is a real list of chronologically ordered videos, but videos are not listed twice. This means if the video appears in the first list (as "relevant") then it will not be shown in the second list. The end result is that the subscriptions page now shows videos "in order", but the order is wrong. My current subscription page shows a video from 14 hours ago, then a video from 9 days ago, then one from 5 days ago, then 6 days ago, and then 1 day ago. Honestly, I feel like `yt-dlp` does a better job of this with this command: yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser chrome --flat-playlist https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
  - 6mo ago
loveparade 6mo ago
The whole Youtube experience has gotten so bad over the years. I love the youtube content, but I wish I didn't have to deal with the UI/UX and recommendations that the YT app forces on me. Annoying Shorts. I'm trying to keep my watch history clean to "steer" recommendations, but YT keeps adding things to it that I didn't actually watch just because I happened to hover my mouse over a video, etc.
- owlboy 6mo ago
  They see those hovers as attention. And they likely calculate how long you linger. The lingering tells them a lot when you are infinite scrolling on other platforms. They would love to have full on eye tracking. So the next best thing is a cursor. (Even though I’d agreed with anyone who says it’s a poor signal.)
  - macintux 6mo ago
    I’m suddenly grateful that I use my iPad, so they can’t use that signal on me.
    - dns_snek 6mo ago
      They can see how long you stop scrolling, too.
- nonethewiser 6mo ago
  Why does opening the youtube app sometimes just go straight into a short? I mean, i know why it does that. Engagement. But I mean what governs it? Just a percent chance? If you havent watched any shorts in a while? Definitely another example of the shit UI/UX you speak of.
6thbit 6mo ago
I still can’t believe they don’t let you search videos within a channel for example. Or filter out music playlist from video ones. Or search within transcripts. It’s peak irony a company owned by the search overlord.
- gbnwl 6mo ago
  You can search videos within a channel, go to the channel page and look for the magnifying glass all the way at the end of the nav bar that has Home | Videos | Shorts | Playlists | Posts | *Magnifying glass here* Well at least in browser its there, I can't find it on mobile for whatever reason.
  - 6thbit 6mo ago
    you're right! i was only looking at the mobile version. Sucks it's not there cause I typically don't have my pc around when infront of the TV and wanna search something.
- eieio 6mo ago
  I made a little TUI last month for searching within a channel! It supports before: / after:, fuzzy/exact/regex matching, lets you order by upload date/views/duration, lets you search over just a video's titles or descriptions, etc: https://github.com/nolenroyalty/yt-browse https://github.com/nolenroyalty/yt-browse The vast majority of my youtube watching is "go to a specific channel and try to find a certain kind of video" so it drives me nuts that youtube channel search is so bad (and afaik you can't search a channel on mobile?). I end up using my tool to find a bunch of videos and get them into my history to watch on my ipad. n.b. my tool downloads all video metadata for a channel and then searches over it locally, so it's pretty slow the first time you search a channel (results are cached for 24 hours though).
- userbinator 6mo ago
  It’s peak irony a company owned by the search overlord. ...whose search engine has itself become noticeably less of a search engine and more of a recommendation/sheeple-herding engine over time.
dbbk 6mo ago
It works perfectly fine.
throw7 6mo ago
Just asking: Is there an open source project that I can self-host that can organize my current subscriptions into separate groups/categories and make things easy to view/hide/digest? Many moons ago, I could hover and hide a video I didn't want to see in my feed with a single click. Best UX user feature evar... it was gone in a week or two I feel. I'm kinda ashamed to say I have multiple youtube accounts to keep my sanity, but yeah.
- dugite-code 6mo ago
  Yes any RSS reader works for this task. There are two types of channel RSS feeds https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<CHANNEL_ID> And the older https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=<username> Youtube used to have an opml export button but there are a few github projects that convert the youtube subscription csv that dumps out of the account data export. Edit: If you want to filter out shorts using the selfhosted application rssbridge allows you to do this.
  - throw7 6mo ago
    ok thanks!, i never knew there was an rss feed for each channel/users... that does open up solutions.
  - Fr0styMatt88 6mo ago
    This is great!
- maxxmod 6mo ago
  Not exactly what you’re looking for, but Pocket Tube [1] [2] is a browser extension that lets you organize your subscriptions into custom groups. You can then browse non-algorithmic feeds showing the latest uploads from each group, which makes things much easier to manage and filter. Hope this helps. Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with Pocket Tube. I’m currently working on https://maxxmod.com https://maxxmod.com, a YouTube-focused browser extension, so I’ve researched the ecosystem. [1] Website: https://pockettube.io https://pockettube.io [2] Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-subscription-groups https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-subsc...
SilverElfin 6mo ago
Really wish there was an alternative. Especially to the manipulation of it all by YouTube (demonetization and other tactics).
perching_aix 6mo ago
Author must clearly never use porn sites like xvideos or PornHub, if they think YouTube's search is what "barely works".
cj00 6mo ago
Yeah searching your history is so terrible too I ended up making a custom database that takes the also horrible Takeout output and parses it into a SQLite db. I end up relying on it when I remember some video I started watching weeks ago but can’t remember where it was anymore.
- owlboy 6mo ago
  Do you automate your takeout so the DB is relatively fresh?
RRRA 6mo ago
Yeah the only reason I still use YouTube is because μBlock Origin still works great.
storus 6mo ago
Cable TV->enshittification->YouTube to the rescue->enshittification->???
phyzix5761 6mo ago
I want to be able to search youtube videos for specific content. Like a middle aged man talking about football who is wearing a light blue shirt and holding a sports bottle. With AI we should be able to do that but maybe the compute cost is currently too high. I envision it sort of like a SQL for video search.
moralestapia 6mo ago
YouTube search went to absolute trash, same as Gmail, same as Google the search engine. Many time I search for a video I know the title of, letter by letter, in quotes, and it does not show up (at least in the first 50 or so results). Sometimes I think the video might have been deleted, only to find it out later in my bookmarks and realizing this is not the case. Crazy how them being fundamental to what we all know as "the web" nowadays, allows them to get away with being extremely mediocre and oblivious to user's needs.
- storus 6mo ago
  I am forced to use Yandex just to find stuff Google or DDG never shows anymore.
  - carefree-bob 6mo ago
    Interesting. Do you have some examples?
- Esn024 6mo ago
  I often find that using Google Search (the Video tab, with "site:youtube.com") allows me to find videos that don't show up in the YouTube search... or sometimes vice versa!
jdprgm 6mo ago
Yeah Youtube search is mediocre, though I feel like search has broadly declined across the entire web on all sorts of apps and services I use. Not to mention all the actual "search engines" feeling less and less powerful every year. I don't get it.
BoppreH 6mo ago
YouTube search is one of those services that is pointlessly hostile. Most recently, they've removed the "order by upload date" filter, and changed the way that blurring works. Previously, sensitive videos had blurred thumbnails and a toggle to remove the blur (even though it had no way to never blur). Now the UI looks the same, but the "toggle" reloads the page without any filters, and adding a filter re-blurs them. So it's impossible to filter results and see unblurred thumbnails. These changes baffle me. It's not even enshittification because I cannot see any benefit to YouTube at all.
zmmmmm 6mo ago
This is much needed. It says so much that "Title includes" is an advanced search .... I really wonder what a basic search is. My pet peeve: no way to filter on language. Once you hit obscure enough content, you start getting videos back in languages you can't understand. With no way to filter them out. So frustrating. Would be great to add that here. Assuming it even exists in the metadata.
swrly 6mo ago
I agree, YouTube search is completely useless when we really need it. Especially with fizzy search!
jmyeet 6mo ago
It's kind of weird that Youtube search continues to be as bad it is. I honestly don't get it. When video first became popular, I got it. Scrapers had very little to go on: title, channel, tags (later), description, likes, dislikes (saldy, no more). There's only so much you can do with that. But times have changed. You can (within limits) link videos within videos. Google of course also has the entire Web to analyze links to videos. And then a decade or so ago we started to get automated transcripts, at which point search really should be getting on par with text-based search. Now? You have any number of LLMs you could develop to gather features from videos or could construct higher context than a pure word search. Also, Google's personalized search should be able to work well for videos. What category does it fit in? What demographics like it? Do people like you like it? I don't get it. Ok, as for the tool, does it work with "norms" of Google search? Do you really need boxes for "exact phrase" and "exclude" when you have double quotes and the hypen (respectively) for both of those things? Likewise do "from" and "to" type searches (a la Gmail) work? I ask because a single search box has definite advantages and you can keep adding search criteria as you see fit. In an ideal world, I'd also like to be able to search for videos I watched and I liked (eg "is:liked", "is:watched") and search channel categories or labels.
tcherasaro 6mo ago
Potentially unpopular idea: Maybe YouTube search is so bad because videos are poorly optimized for search. Today most of the emphasis to creators on YouTube is to create content that targets browse traffic and shorts to go viral and get millions of views. Not so much videos targeting specific user intent with a term that might get 2k views per month if it ranks #1.
- tredre3 6mo ago
  Your idea doesn't explain why: - YouTube search often doesn't return the correct video when we search an exact title - YouTube search shows entirely unrelated videos after the first 4-5 results
  - tartoran 6mo ago
    -YouTube search returns popular completely unrelated content (mostly brainrot) which is clearly feeding to users to watch in case they forgot they were searching for something else -YouTube search returns unrelated videos that were partially watched Clearly the youtube search is broken on purpose. It's hard to forget how google search went from good to barely usable and it's hard not to notice how they're applying the same strategy
  - tcherasaro 6mo ago
    I've certainly experienced both of these and a lot of the other occurrences people are describing here, but here's what I think is going on in these 2 cases and why. This is based on my own observations actually trying to get videos ranked in search. Immediately after publishing a search optimized video the main way I measure if I was successful with the technical part of optimization (Title, description, transcript, Text Overlay, keyword density) is to search the exact title to see if my video appears. Immediately after publishing like within minutes, it usually does appear within the first five to ten results. After the youtube "testing period" if the CTR and AVD (retention) are good, then the views increase from there as the video starts to rank and get tested for more related keywords. And the video certainly continues to rank for the exact title. If click through and retention are bad in the testing period then the video fails to rank and the video seems to disappear or get pushed way down when searching exact title. So I believe CTR and AVD maybe factors in YouTube SEO. After 3-5 results I have noticed that there seems be a segment of long form videos and then shorts actually targeting that casual browse traffic in a search result page! The long form results in those positions are usually weak on technical optimization, only tangentially related or fluffy in terms of delivering on the user's search intent, but from larger channels that are heavily edited, produced and optimized for click through and viewer retention. The kind of hostile user experience that tries to keep people watching for longer with retention editing and by teasing or hyping good info when the user really just needs answers but are easily enticed by better packaging when the first 3 results didn't meet their intent. I notice the same videos again and again in those positions for a wide range of primary keywords and even the seed keyword, and they get tons of search traffic even though they aren't answering user intent because youtube has realized these videos are effective at converting a laser-focused search user looking for specific information into a casual viewer who is happy to be entertained for a longer period of time when they couldn't find the information they were really looking for. Let's face it, if the first few results didn't deliver, weren't optimized; then from YouTube's perspective, the user is browsing at that point and it's going to do it's best to retain them.
LeonTing1010 6mo ago
[flagged]
dawnerd 6mo ago
Search is intentionally bad. You can search for something very generic where there should be millions of videos but only get about one page worth before it pushes shorts and other unrelated algo driven content.
danpalmer 6mo ago
Can anyone describe the problem and use-case in more detail? I've heard this before but it just doesn't resonate at all, and I'm a pretty heavy YouTube user. I mostly watch videos from my home feed or from channels I subscribe to. When I search it's almost always either: - film/game trailers I've heard about and want to find (e.g. gta vi trailer) - videos I've watched before but maybe not liked, with a channel keyword and maybe video keyword (e.g. tom scott bell), or music - tutorials, where I don't really care about the specific video, I care about the outcome (e.g. how to remove roller blind) In all of these cases search seems to nail it. The trailer is always the first result (but could be from a variety of sources), the recall on videos I've seen before is basically perfect, and the tutorials get me to the right outcome. Are people using search for discovery, like putting in a vague topic and trying to explore a topic from search? What specific kinds of queries does it do badly at?
- Barrin92 6mo ago
  >What specific kinds of queries does it do badly at? in my experience all of them, because the experience for me currently is that youtube surfaces ~3 videos relevant to the search I entered, then the bizarre category of "here's other stuff you want to watch" (I don't) followed by "stuff you already watched but want to watch again" (I don't and didn't ask), followed by like 10 shorts and then again a handful of results relevant to the query
  - danpalmer 6mo ago
    I haven't noticed this because in all of the above examples the first result is the one I want, almost without exception. In a scenario where the top result or two is correct, showing other stuff after result 3 doesn't sound that bad. What sorts of searches are you doing? My guess is this really matters and that you're using search for a completely different purpose to me, but I don't know what that is.
    - dns_snek 6mo ago
      I'm not the person you were asking, but broadly speaking, almost any instructional video. How do I do/fix/repair/cook/make XYZ? It's a complete lottery whether the top 3 results will actually answer the question and they usually won't.
gall 6mo ago
The date filters seem to be ignored for certain search terms and not others. Searching for, say, "dune before:2019-04-05" filters as expected, but searching for current events proximate terms like "iran" or "donald" returns results that disregard the date ceiling completely.
- usernamed7 6mo ago
  I confirmed searching for "Iran" with a before set ends up showing me all recent results. BUT if i use this search form to generate the query (and not the youtube search bar) it works. via the search form: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+%22iran%22+before%3A2020-10-22&sp=EgIQAQ%253D%253D https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+%22iran%22+bef... via the YT search: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+%22iran%22+before%3A2020-10-22 https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+%22iran%22+bef...
aaa_aaa 6mo ago
Downfall of youtube is one word: shorts.
rvnx 6mo ago
The worst offender is Apple Music search. Sad because the service is great
ankitsanghi 6mo ago
I've actually never had an issue with YouTube search. I can usually search by what I saw in the video roughly and it works almost every time. I hate that the top 4 4-6 videos are YouTube shorts but that's fine I get they're trying to push shorts heavily.
Esn024 6mo ago
Nice work! Does this use the YouTube data API behind the scenes? https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/search/list https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/search/list Also, would adding any of the following be possible? 1) Search for specific video quality (standard YouTube search already does this - you can ask for "HD", but would it be possible to search for more specific qualities such as 480p, 720p, etc?) 2) Search for videos only in a specific language 3) Search only for videos that have subtitles in a specific language 4) more detailed length search for the "over 20 minutes" category (e.g. over 40 minutes, over 60 minutes, etc) All of these are things that I have desperately wished existed over the past few years, and which would have sometimes saved me a lot of time.
- Vachyas 6mo ago
  I'd like to second that I wish a lot of those existed. For 1), 60fps is another good one. It seems Youtube also removed "sort by upload date" if I'm not mistaken. The closest we can get now is the "uploaded today" filter but it's not the same since it still seems to prioritize popularity over recency, surfacing mostly second-hand sources or popular "reactions" to the primary-source videos (that also exist on Youtube!) I'm actually looking for. Edit: IIRC they even used to have an "uploaded in last hour" filter, but I'm not sure. Can anyone confirm this?
  - nevernothing 6mo ago
    Yes, there was a filter for the last hour, I think they got rid of it this year.
- nevernothing 6mo ago
  The search form does not use the YouTube Data API. It's essentially a link generator. Unfortunately YouTube doesn't offer filters for point 1–4.
hexage1814 6mo ago
You should add this option to filter shorts: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&sp=CAI%253D https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&sp=CAI%253D Also, related project: https://filmot.com/search/radiohead%20/1/1?sortField=uploaddate&sortOrder=desc&gridView=yes& https://filmot.com/search/radiohead%20/1/1?sortField=uploadd... It allows you to do text to full search on youtube videos. The project obviously didn't index ALL youtube videos subtitles, but it easily index millions of youtube subtitles.
- nevernothing 6mo ago
  Thanks for the tip, the Shorts filter is now on by default.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
micw 6mo ago
Hey great. Need the same for amazon ^^
oyebenny 6mo ago
Colour me surpised.
gbro3n 6mo ago
It's always surprised me that Youtube being owned by the worlds leading search company has such awful on-site search. I've always left Youtube and searched for youtube videos via Google search, which brings up better results!
- Dban1 6mo ago
  Hostile engineering
  - gbro3n 6mo ago
    Maybe, I'm not clear what the goal is though.
    - yoavm 6mo ago
      I guess YouTube doesn't really have any competition, i.e it's not like you're going to switch to the competitor video platform and search there. Your only option is to watch through multiple other videos before finding the one you want, which is great for them.
jfoster 6mo ago
Really nice. Bookmarked it. Thank you for making it!
diceduckmonk 6mo ago
The irony with Google, er alphabet, a search company, is that the search feature are deeply flawed in their products. If you have thousands of resources in GCP, for example, the search is not super helpful.
WhyIsItAlwaysHN 6mo ago
Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but this seems to just create the search string in the url, aka youtube search already supports these features. If people were really looking for exact title search they could write "term". It is definitely true that youtube's search is optimized for engagement, but going through a separate ui just to search it seems a bit redundant, especially if after I click search I have ti deal with youtube's UI.
WASDx 6mo ago
Similar site with same features: https://ä1.com/ https://xn--1-zfa.com/
moropex 6mo ago
been doing site:youtube.com on google for years because youtube search is that bad. the google video option here is a nice touch
Vachyas 6mo ago
I was hoping to finally see an advanced time filter so I could do something like "over 2 minutes" but it seems you've only got the same ones Youtube has (< 4 minutes, 4-20, and > 20). If it's an opaqueness restriction with the API or something, I'd like to suggest letting us at least combine the provided ones, so I could do something like (4-20) && (> 20) to get "over 4 minutes" which doesn't exist on Youtube but seems pretty useful. Another thing that would be useful is filter-by-channel since the search function within Youtube for searching a channel's uploads (using the search button on a channel's page) is a significantly nerfed version of their usual search function.
- AlBugdy 6mo ago
  I wish I could select "between 2.5 and 6 minutes". That search can translate to 2 queries to YouTube (<4 and 4-20), then the results can be combined and pruned to keep only those between 2.5 and 6. To get enough videos if there aren't enough after pruning, we could access the 2nd, 3rd and so on pages from the results. But I doubt YouTube will like 6 searches in a row.
  - Vachyas 6mo ago
    Yea and I'm doubtful we'll see a service willing to do their own post-processing per-query while also being at the whim of Youtube's API (official or not). Ultimately, I would like these features to come to Youtube itself since there's a lot of nice features built into it that would be hard for a third-party to replicate without permission (such as playing videos inline on hover, with captions).
    - AlBugdy 6mo ago
      I doubt it will ever happen. This is Google after all, not a small company we can hope will get it right after a while. They've left the search parameters shitty for years. Google, arguably the most advanced search company ever, can't make an efficient filter for custom time ranges? They obviously can, but, as other comments have noted, they seem to think that good search is an anti-feature.
- 6mo ago
Duplicake 6mo ago
All this does it generate a search term from what you put in which you can do pretty easily yourself
nightrate_ai 6mo ago
[dead]
Alifatisk 6mo ago
I feel like we have reached a point where Youtube can just remove the search fields and let their algorithms do its thing. The last time I tried YTs search field was when I was trying to find an older video in my history. Nothing, even if I typed down the exact keywords. Nothing. Luckily, I found it through myactivity.google.com. Its actually kind of fascinating how a huge enterprise like Youtube can ruin a feature to the point that its actually useless. What they are good at is pushing irrelevant content everywhere, if I scroll to the bottom of my playlist, there is a suggestions feed. If I search something, after a couple of results, it turns into a suggestion feed. Even my subscribers feed is now a recommendations system at the top instead of just displaying in chronological order. If it wasn’t for their dominance in the market, I would have left long time ago. But I am stuck there, because the creators are there. uBlock and Sponsorblock is a bless. I am curious if there is alternative frontends to youtube that also allows me to sign in with my Googlw account and access all my playlist, likes, watch later etc.
- loloquwowndueo 6mo ago
  > I am stuck there, because the creators are there. Don’t make this mistake. You are not “stuck” - you’re making a choice. You can also choose to seek other materials elsewhere to stay entertained.
- etothet 6mo ago
  > Its actually kind of fascinating how a huge enterprise like Youtube can ruin a feature to the point that its actually useless. For the people in charge of engagement at YouTube, making search useless is a feature. If most people don’t get value from search then they’ll resign and be forced into following the algorithm, which is how Google wants you to consume YouTube. Similar reason why streaming providers keep making it more difficult to find your previously watched list.
- nonethewiser 6mo ago
  > I feel like we have reached a point where Youtube can just remove the search fields and let their algorithms do its thing. > The last time I tried YTs search field was when I was trying to find an older video in my history. Nothing, even if I typed down the exact keywords. Nothing. Luckily, I found it through myactivity.google.com. I have had a similar experience but it seems ridiculous to propose removing the search. It's not like its returning random results. It does generally work, even with the major failure points you describe.
xtiansimon 6mo ago
Ooh. I despise how YouTube removes videos from my saved videos list, “Unavailable videos were removed”. YouTube is crap.
carlosjobim 6mo ago
Would it be possible to toggle the search to exclude all videos with emojis in their title? I've noticed that every YouTube video containing one or more emojis in their title are AI generated spam.
jjallen 6mo ago
I’ve never been annoyed with YouTube search. Product is great as far as I’m concerned. Love YouTube all around.
joserohan 6mo ago
Looks neat!
rallypi 6mo ago
[flagged]
phendrenad2 6mo ago
I've just stopped using YouTube entirely. I'll watch the odd video that gets linked somewhere else, but I actively avoid going there. And this is as someone who used to pay for YouTube Premium. The site just doesn't value my time, and the company seems to think that I'll just accept watching whatever the algorithms decides I should watch. No thanks.
nonethewiser 6mo ago
This is the "normal science" of software engineering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science
loloktryagain 6mo ago
It literally just parses it into a regular YouTube search, this is vaporware trash
fighting_anakin 6mo ago
Thank god. I can't believe how horrible youtube's search functionality has gotten. I wonder if it's a function of scale or due to the new generation not engaging with old videos.
KellyCriterion 6mo ago
Can it sort by "upload date" which was removed by YT some weeks ago?
sorkhabi 6mo ago
I tested your app. It works well and is super fast. Well done.
spacec0wb0y 6mo ago
That's pretty useful. On the form, the "Date before" and "Date after" field naming is confusing. I'd expect the earlier date to display first and be called "from" rather than "Date after". You could probably restrict the date fields too so users can't pick dates in the future
japaco 6mo ago
Now this is a game changer for YouTube. I admit I'm still a YT platform junkie, but it's the only platform I scroll, so I give myself a little latitude. Nice job!

325 points by nevernothing 6mo ago

This is just adding the hidden filters such as before:[date]: Finds videos uploaded before a specific date. Example: space exploration before:2020-01-01 after:[date]: Finds videos uploaded after a specific date. Example: tech news after:2024-01-01 To an UI, right?

throw_m239339 6mo ago
As long I doesn't shove "shorts" or "other people watched" in the result list, it's an improvement. Sometimes the results are so egregious and completely unrelated to the search terms that I feel like youtube wants to piss me off on purpose. I don't want to be searching some quantum physics video and get videos of some barely clothed women in Miami, I fail to see how it is related...
- tremarley 6mo ago
  Enshittification is the reason
awesome_dude 6mo ago
I think that it's a fair title - it takes the "hidden" search terms and brings them to the surface for users. The (default) YouTube search is barely useful They have made a search WITH the advanced features available Everything as advertised (IMO)
bryanhogan 6mo ago
One of the problems with YouTube seach is that they also stop showing you what you searched for after a couple of videos, instead you get the same crap you find on the homepage, which is bewildering.
- bilegeek 6mo ago
  Can't remember where I got them, but there's some uBO rules that really help on that front: youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer.style-scope:has(span:has-text(/Related to your search/i)) youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer.style-scope:has(span:has-text(/Related to your searches/i)) youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer.style-scope:has(span:has-text(/From related searches/i)) youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/People also watched/) youtube.com###contents > ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/For you/) youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer.style-scope:has(span:has-text(/Watch again/i)) youtube.com##ytd-horizontal-card-list-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope:has(span:has-text(/Searches related to/i)) youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer.style-scope:has(span:has-text(/Learn while you\'re at home/i)) youtube.com##ytd-horizontal-card-list-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope youtube.com###secondary > .ytd-two-column-search-results-renderer youtube.com###contents > .ytd-secondary-search-container-renderer.style-scope youtube.com##ytd-shelf-renderer:has-text(/Previously watched/) Also got some other rules from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44332976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44332976 This all shouldn't be necessary, but alas...
prophesi 6mo ago
One of the first things I do on a new device is install an extension to expose these hidden filters, and to hide recommended videos + redirect the homepage to the subscriptions tab.
- cure_42 6mo ago
  What extension exposes the hidden filters???
  - prophesi 6mo ago
    You could probably vibe-code it if it doesn't exist. You're literally just adding extra parameters to the search request. Hard part is creating the interface for it. Saw more options looking for Firefox extensions than Chrome for this, though that might be expected.
    - lucb1e 6mo ago
      > One of the first things I do on a new device is install an extension to ... < [which one] > vibe-code it if it doesn't exist So it doesn't exist? I don't understand what I'm reading. (Plus the suggestion to create more slopware)
      - prophesi 6mo ago
        > You're literally just adding extra parameters to the search request > Saw more options looking for Firefox extensions than Chrome for this, though that might be expected. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough in my comment that it's a very trivial feature. Would you want a lmgtfy link instead? edit: The irony that this very submission is probably AI generated? There's no link to their source code, and there's a tab titled "AI Generator" for AI generated playlists?
        tredre3 6mo ago
        I think there's been a break in this conversation somewhere. You said: One of the first things I do on a new device is install an extension to expose these hidden filters Someone asked you to name the extension. Then you go on saying it's easy to vibe code and you're not here to hold hands? Okay, so does the extension exist or not?
nevernothing 6mo ago
You're basically right, it's just a UI for the old search filters, at least for the ones that still work today.

atum47 6mo ago

I'm not popular enough to write a post about everything that is wrong with YouTube, from recommending the same few videos over and over again in different "categories" to ALL the results of a search being cringe shorts no one wants to see.

jeffbee 6mo ago
I know it's really really loud in your echo chamber but short form videos are extremely popular.
- mech422 6mo ago
  He didn't say they weren't ? He said youtube keeps recommending 'cringe' shorts no-one wants to see. I can sympathize with him - I have the youtube recommends the same 4 videos over and over again in multiple categories issue, and the 'lots of shorts I don't care about issue'. Though, shorts at least get refreshed/rotated more often then the stupid suggestions.
owlboy 6mo ago
I desperately want someone to interview someone at YouTube and directly ask about this bullshit and get them to say it’s all in the name of increasing watch time at all costs.
atum47 6mo ago
https://anonmp4.help/v/SCBI4QBrglJIZix https://anonmp4.help/v/SCBI4QBrglJIZix See if you can count how many times the video "where do video games come from" appears in my front page.

wincy 6mo ago

For April Fools Sega released an (actual, real) “Sanic the Hedgeheg” t-shirt and I wanted to see if there was anything about it on YouTube. YouTube assumed I meant “sonic” and it was impossible to correct it and say “no I’m actually searching for this dumb meme”. It just assumes everyone who uses YouTube is really dumb I guess. (I bought the shirt by the way and am excited to get it lol)

msephton 6mo ago
Just put the term in quotes "sanic the hedgeheg" ignore the suggestions and press enter to see the real results.
- thfuran 6mo ago
  Google no longer cares much about quotes. Sometimes it’ll take them seriously and sometimes not.
  - lelandfe 6mo ago
    For instance, searching the quoted (random phrase) "pants butler" produces first page results like: "pants,” Butler" and "pants...Butler" and "Pants - Butler's" Second page loses it entirely, with results like "BUTLER SVC Green Back Country Cargo Pants" and another that seemingly lacks "butler" anywhere on the page.
    - iamnothere 6mo ago
      I have also noticed this. Many other search engines have started doing it too. If I had to guess, they are probably deferring to autocorrect if a quoted search doesn’t appear often enough to be notable and the distance to existing common tokens is small. This really sucks, because it means that you can’t search for uncommon things that are named similarly to common terms. Once upon a time it wasn’t like this. A similar problem comes up if you want to clarify a common search with an uncommon term, like (made up example here) “German castle Tokyo”. Once upon a time you could quote the uncommon term or prefix it with a plus to force a narrowing of the results. This could find discussions or specific posts with unusual combinations of words, which was great when you knew were looking for something very specific and obscure. Now this hardly ever works, and instead they just ignore your extra term. Sometimes the search engine “AI assistants” can find these things if you prompt correctly, which is maybe the most useful application of AI that I’ve found. But even then they often don’t seem to search that deeply, and often they will just assume that your query is invalid and gaslight you.

VenezuelaFree 6mo ago

Search is the reason I stopped watching youtube, I used to view and discover so many nice stuff in there, tutorials, new hobbies, new music, new creators with different interests, etc but now it's pretty much impossible to find, you are forced to watch the 3 top videos, some 3 ads and then it forces you to watch some other random unrelated crap, it's so annoying and frustrating It got so bad that even searching the full tittle of the video doesnt show you that video haha

gsky 6mo ago
on top of that it pushes worst creators (who are the biggest thanks to yt) content.
- The_Goonies1985 6mo ago
  [dead]
- Red_or_Blue 6mo ago
  [dead]
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
tyrust 6mo ago
> you are forced to watch the 3 top videos, some 3 ads and then it forces you to watch some other random unrelated crap, it's so annoying and frustrating Brother, you are the one choosing the videos.
- wswope 6mo ago
  Exactly the sort of user hostility I’d expect from a google employee. Shameful. Maybe if practical tools such as like-ratios were in place users could sort good content from bad.
  - tyrust 6mo ago

ddtaylor 6mo ago

If anyone has a good solution to YouTube destroying all value of the Subscriptions page I am open ears. Until recently my consumption of YT was basically to go to my subscriptions page and see what new content had been released since I last watched YT.

atomicfiredoll 6mo ago
Things like FreeTube and NewPipe let you keep a subscription list, even if you watch the videos elsewhere. Using them can be a pain with the whole cat and mouse thing, but at least it's something (for now... I wouldn't be shocked if google was partially gunning for projects like NewPipe specifically with the Android app installation changes.)
loveparade 6mo ago
You could manage your subscriptions in an RSS reader, that's what I used to do. Each channel has multiple RSS feeds associated with it for different types of videos (live, vod, etc).
jeffbee 6mo ago
That's ... exactly what the subscriptions feed does right now?
- ddtaylor 6mo ago
  The subscriptions page was changed about a month ago. It now shows the videos in the top as "Relevant", which includes a list of videos from the ~12 days that are being suggested to you. After that is a real list of chronologically ordered videos, but videos are not listed twice. This means if the video appears in the first list (as "relevant") then it will not be shown in the second list. The end result is that the subscriptions page now shows videos "in order", but the order is wrong. My current subscription page shows a video from 14 hours ago, then a video from 9 days ago, then one from 5 days ago, then 6 days ago, and then 1 day ago. Honestly, I feel like `yt-dlp` does a better job of this with this command: yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser chrome --flat-playlist https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
- 6mo ago

loveparade 6mo ago

The whole Youtube experience has gotten so bad over the years. I love the youtube content, but I wish I didn't have to deal with the UI/UX and recommendations that the YT app forces on me. Annoying Shorts. I'm trying to keep my watch history clean to "steer" recommendations, but YT keeps adding things to it that I didn't actually watch just because I happened to hover my mouse over a video, etc.

owlboy 6mo ago
They see those hovers as attention. And they likely calculate how long you linger. The lingering tells them a lot when you are infinite scrolling on other platforms. They would love to have full on eye tracking. So the next best thing is a cursor. (Even though I’d agreed with anyone who says it’s a poor signal.)
- macintux 6mo ago
  I’m suddenly grateful that I use my iPad, so they can’t use that signal on me.
  - dns_snek 6mo ago
    They can see how long you stop scrolling, too.
nonethewiser 6mo ago
Why does opening the youtube app sometimes just go straight into a short? I mean, i know why it does that. Engagement. But I mean what governs it? Just a percent chance? If you havent watched any shorts in a while? Definitely another example of the shit UI/UX you speak of.

6thbit 6mo ago

I still can’t believe they don’t let you search videos within a channel for example. Or filter out music playlist from video ones. Or search within transcripts. It’s peak irony a company owned by the search overlord.

gbnwl 6mo ago
You can search videos within a channel, go to the channel page and look for the magnifying glass all the way at the end of the nav bar that has Home | Videos | Shorts | Playlists | Posts | *Magnifying glass here* Well at least in browser its there, I can't find it on mobile for whatever reason.
- 6thbit 6mo ago
  you're right! i was only looking at the mobile version. Sucks it's not there cause I typically don't have my pc around when infront of the TV and wanna search something.
eieio 6mo ago
I made a little TUI last month for searching within a channel! It supports before: / after:, fuzzy/exact/regex matching, lets you order by upload date/views/duration, lets you search over just a video's titles or descriptions, etc: https://github.com/nolenroyalty/yt-browse https://github.com/nolenroyalty/yt-browse The vast majority of my youtube watching is "go to a specific channel and try to find a certain kind of video" so it drives me nuts that youtube channel search is so bad (and afaik you can't search a channel on mobile?). I end up using my tool to find a bunch of videos and get them into my history to watch on my ipad. n.b. my tool downloads all video metadata for a channel and then searches over it locally, so it's pretty slow the first time you search a channel (results are cached for 24 hours though).
userbinator 6mo ago
It’s peak irony a company owned by the search overlord. ...whose search engine has itself become noticeably less of a search engine and more of a recommendation/sheeple-herding engine over time.

dbbk 6mo ago

It works perfectly fine.

throw7 6mo ago

Just asking: Is there an open source project that I can self-host that can organize my current subscriptions into separate groups/categories and make things easy to view/hide/digest? Many moons ago, I could hover and hide a video I didn't want to see in my feed with a single click. Best UX user feature evar... it was gone in a week or two I feel. I'm kinda ashamed to say I have multiple youtube accounts to keep my sanity, but yeah.

dugite-code 6mo ago
Yes any RSS reader works for this task. There are two types of channel RSS feeds https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<CHANNEL_ID> And the older https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=<username> Youtube used to have an opml export button but there are a few github projects that convert the youtube subscription csv that dumps out of the account data export. Edit: If you want to filter out shorts using the selfhosted application rssbridge allows you to do this.
- throw7 6mo ago
  ok thanks!, i never knew there was an rss feed for each channel/users... that does open up solutions.
- Fr0styMatt88 6mo ago
  This is great!
maxxmod 6mo ago
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but Pocket Tube [1] [2] is a browser extension that lets you organize your subscriptions into custom groups. You can then browse non-algorithmic feeds showing the latest uploads from each group, which makes things much easier to manage and filter. Hope this helps. Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with Pocket Tube. I’m currently working on https://maxxmod.com https://maxxmod.com, a YouTube-focused browser extension, so I’ve researched the ecosystem. [1] Website: https://pockettube.io https://pockettube.io [2] Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-subscription-groups https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-subsc...

SilverElfin 6mo ago

Really wish there was an alternative. Especially to the manipulation of it all by YouTube (demonetization and other tactics).

perching_aix 6mo ago

Author must clearly never use porn sites like xvideos or PornHub, if they think YouTube's search is what "barely works".

cj00 6mo ago

Yeah searching your history is so terrible too I ended up making a custom database that takes the also horrible Takeout output and parses it into a SQLite db. I end up relying on it when I remember some video I started watching weeks ago but can’t remember where it was anymore.

owlboy 6mo ago
Do you automate your takeout so the DB is relatively fresh?

RRRA 6mo ago

Yeah the only reason I still use YouTube is because μBlock Origin still works great.

storus 6mo ago

Cable TV->enshittification->YouTube to the rescue->enshittification->???

phyzix5761 6mo ago

I want to be able to search youtube videos for specific content. Like a middle aged man talking about football who is wearing a light blue shirt and holding a sports bottle. With AI we should be able to do that but maybe the compute cost is currently too high. I envision it sort of like a SQL for video search.

moralestapia 6mo ago

YouTube search went to absolute trash, same as Gmail, same as Google the search engine. Many time I search for a video I know the title of, letter by letter, in quotes, and it does not show up (at least in the first 50 or so results). Sometimes I think the video might have been deleted, only to find it out later in my bookmarks and realizing this is not the case. Crazy how them being fundamental to what we all know as "the web" nowadays, allows them to get away with being extremely mediocre and oblivious to user's needs.

storus 6mo ago
I am forced to use Yandex just to find stuff Google or DDG never shows anymore.
- carefree-bob 6mo ago
  Interesting. Do you have some examples?
Esn024 6mo ago
I often find that using Google Search (the Video tab, with "site:youtube.com") allows me to find videos that don't show up in the YouTube search... or sometimes vice versa!

jdprgm 6mo ago

Yeah Youtube search is mediocre, though I feel like search has broadly declined across the entire web on all sorts of apps and services I use. Not to mention all the actual "search engines" feeling less and less powerful every year. I don't get it.

BoppreH 6mo ago

YouTube search is one of those services that is pointlessly hostile. Most recently, they've removed the "order by upload date" filter, and changed the way that blurring works. Previously, sensitive videos had blurred thumbnails and a toggle to remove the blur (even though it had no way to never blur). Now the UI looks the same, but the "toggle" reloads the page without any filters, and adding a filter re-blurs them. So it's impossible to filter results and see unblurred thumbnails. These changes baffle me. It's not even enshittification because I cannot see any benefit to YouTube at all.

zmmmmm 6mo ago

This is much needed. It says so much that "Title includes" is an advanced search .... I really wonder what a basic search is. My pet peeve: no way to filter on language. Once you hit obscure enough content, you start getting videos back in languages you can't understand. With no way to filter them out. So frustrating. Would be great to add that here. Assuming it even exists in the metadata.

swrly 6mo ago

I agree, YouTube search is completely useless when we really need it. Especially with fizzy search!

jmyeet 6mo ago

It's kind of weird that Youtube search continues to be as bad it is. I honestly don't get it. When video first became popular, I got it. Scrapers had very little to go on: title, channel, tags (later), description, likes, dislikes (saldy, no more). There's only so much you can do with that. But times have changed. You can (within limits) link videos within videos. Google of course also has the entire Web to analyze links to videos. And then a decade or so ago we started to get automated transcripts, at which point search really should be getting on par with text-based search. Now? You have any number of LLMs you could develop to gather features from videos or could construct higher context than a pure word search. Also, Google's personalized search should be able to work well for videos. What category does it fit in? What demographics like it? Do people like you like it? I don't get it. Ok, as for the tool, does it work with "norms" of Google search? Do you really need boxes for "exact phrase" and "exclude" when you have double quotes and the hypen (respectively) for both of those things? Likewise do "from" and "to" type searches (a la Gmail) work? I ask because a single search box has definite advantages and you can keep adding search criteria as you see fit. In an ideal world, I'd also like to be able to search for videos I watched and I liked (eg "is:liked", "is:watched") and search channel categories or labels.

tcherasaro 6mo ago

Potentially unpopular idea: Maybe YouTube search is so bad because videos are poorly optimized for search. Today most of the emphasis to creators on YouTube is to create content that targets browse traffic and shorts to go viral and get millions of views. Not so much videos targeting specific user intent with a term that might get 2k views per month if it ranks #1.

tredre3 6mo ago
Your idea doesn't explain why: - YouTube search often doesn't return the correct video when we search an exact title - YouTube search shows entirely unrelated videos after the first 4-5 results
- tartoran 6mo ago
  -YouTube search returns popular completely unrelated content (mostly brainrot) which is clearly feeding to users to watch in case they forgot they were searching for something else -YouTube search returns unrelated videos that were partially watched Clearly the youtube search is broken on purpose. It's hard to forget how google search went from good to barely usable and it's hard not to notice how they're applying the same strategy
- tcherasaro 6mo ago
  I've certainly experienced both of these and a lot of the other occurrences people are describing here, but here's what I think is going on in these 2 cases and why. This is based on my own observations actually trying to get videos ranked in search. Immediately after publishing a search optimized video the main way I measure if I was successful with the technical part of optimization (Title, description, transcript, Text Overlay, keyword density) is to search the exact title to see if my video appears. Immediately after publishing like within minutes, it usually does appear within the first five to ten results. After the youtube "testing period" if the CTR and AVD (retention) are good, then the views increase from there as the video starts to rank and get tested for more related keywords. And the video certainly continues to rank for the exact title. If click through and retention are bad in the testing period then the video fails to rank and the video seems to disappear or get pushed way down when searching exact title. So I believe CTR and AVD maybe factors in YouTube SEO. After 3-5 results I have noticed that there seems be a segment of long form videos and then shorts actually targeting that casual browse traffic in a search result page! The long form results in those positions are usually weak on technical optimization, only tangentially related or fluffy in terms of delivering on the user's search intent, but from larger channels that are heavily edited, produced and optimized for click through and viewer retention. The kind of hostile user experience that tries to keep people watching for longer with retention editing and by teasing or hyping good info when the user really just needs answers but are easily enticed by better packaging when the first 3 results didn't meet their intent. I notice the same videos again and again in those positions for a wide range of primary keywords and even the seed keyword, and they get tons of search traffic even though they aren't answering user intent because youtube has realized these videos are effective at converting a laser-focused search user looking for specific information into a casual viewer who is happy to be entertained for a longer period of time when they couldn't find the information they were really looking for. Let's face it, if the first few results didn't deliver, weren't optimized; then from YouTube's perspective, the user is browsing at that point and it's going to do it's best to retain them.

LeonTing1010 6mo ago

[flagged]

dawnerd 6mo ago

Search is intentionally bad. You can search for something very generic where there should be millions of videos but only get about one page worth before it pushes shorts and other unrelated algo driven content.

danpalmer 6mo ago

Can anyone describe the problem and use-case in more detail? I've heard this before but it just doesn't resonate at all, and I'm a pretty heavy YouTube user. I mostly watch videos from my home feed or from channels I subscribe to. When I search it's almost always either: - film/game trailers I've heard about and want to find (e.g. gta vi trailer) - videos I've watched before but maybe not liked, with a channel keyword and maybe video keyword (e.g. tom scott bell), or music - tutorials, where I don't really care about the specific video, I care about the outcome (e.g. how to remove roller blind) In all of these cases search seems to nail it. The trailer is always the first result (but could be from a variety of sources), the recall on videos I've seen before is basically perfect, and the tutorials get me to the right outcome. Are people using search for discovery, like putting in a vague topic and trying to explore a topic from search? What specific kinds of queries does it do badly at?

Barrin92 6mo ago
>What specific kinds of queries does it do badly at? in my experience all of them, because the experience for me currently is that youtube surfaces ~3 videos relevant to the search I entered, then the bizarre category of "here's other stuff you want to watch" (I don't) followed by "stuff you already watched but want to watch again" (I don't and didn't ask), followed by like 10 shorts and then again a handful of results relevant to the query
- danpalmer 6mo ago
  I haven't noticed this because in all of the above examples the first result is the one I want, almost without exception. In a scenario where the top result or two is correct, showing other stuff after result 3 doesn't sound that bad. What sorts of searches are you doing? My guess is this really matters and that you're using search for a completely different purpose to me, but I don't know what that is.
  - dns_snek 6mo ago
    I'm not the person you were asking, but broadly speaking, almost any instructional video. How do I do/fix/repair/cook/make XYZ? It's a complete lottery whether the top 3 results will actually answer the question and they usually won't.

gall 6mo ago

The date filters seem to be ignored for certain search terms and not others. Searching for, say, "dune before:2019-04-05" filters as expected, but searching for current events proximate terms like "iran" or "donald" returns results that disregard the date ceiling completely.

usernamed7 6mo ago
I confirmed searching for "Iran" with a before set ends up showing me all recent results. BUT if i use this search form to generate the query (and not the youtube search bar) it works. via the search form: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+%22iran%22+before%3A2020-10-22&sp=EgIQAQ%253D%253D https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+%22iran%22+bef... via the YT search: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+%22iran%22+before%3A2020-10-22 https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+%22iran%22+bef...

aaa_aaa 6mo ago

Downfall of youtube is one word: shorts.

rvnx 6mo ago

The worst offender is Apple Music search. Sad because the service is great

ankitsanghi 6mo ago

I've actually never had an issue with YouTube search. I can usually search by what I saw in the video roughly and it works almost every time. I hate that the top 4 4-6 videos are YouTube shorts but that's fine I get they're trying to push shorts heavily.

Esn024 6mo ago

Nice work! Does this use the YouTube data API behind the scenes? https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/search/list https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/search/list Also, would adding any of the following be possible? 1) Search for specific video quality (standard YouTube search already does this - you can ask for "HD", but would it be possible to search for more specific qualities such as 480p, 720p, etc?) 2) Search for videos only in a specific language 3) Search only for videos that have subtitles in a specific language 4) more detailed length search for the "over 20 minutes" category (e.g. over 40 minutes, over 60 minutes, etc) All of these are things that I have desperately wished existed over the past few years, and which would have sometimes saved me a lot of time.

Vachyas 6mo ago
I'd like to second that I wish a lot of those existed. For 1), 60fps is another good one. It seems Youtube also removed "sort by upload date" if I'm not mistaken. The closest we can get now is the "uploaded today" filter but it's not the same since it still seems to prioritize popularity over recency, surfacing mostly second-hand sources or popular "reactions" to the primary-source videos (that also exist on Youtube!) I'm actually looking for. Edit: IIRC they even used to have an "uploaded in last hour" filter, but I'm not sure. Can anyone confirm this?
- nevernothing 6mo ago
  Yes, there was a filter for the last hour, I think they got rid of it this year.
nevernothing 6mo ago
The search form does not use the YouTube Data API. It's essentially a link generator. Unfortunately YouTube doesn't offer filters for point 1–4.

hexage1814 6mo ago

You should add this option to filter shorts: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&sp=CAI%253D https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&sp=CAI%253D Also, related project: https://filmot.com/search/radiohead%20/1/1?sortField=uploaddate&sortOrder=desc&gridView=yes& https://filmot.com/search/radiohead%20/1/1?sortField=uploadd... It allows you to do text to full search on youtube videos. The project obviously didn't index ALL youtube videos subtitles, but it easily index millions of youtube subtitles.

nevernothing 6mo ago
Thanks for the tip, the Shorts filter is now on by default.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

micw 6mo ago

Hey great. Need the same for amazon ^^

oyebenny 6mo ago

Colour me surpised.

gbro3n 6mo ago

It's always surprised me that Youtube being owned by the worlds leading search company has such awful on-site search. I've always left Youtube and searched for youtube videos via Google search, which brings up better results!

Dban1 6mo ago
Hostile engineering
- gbro3n 6mo ago
  Maybe, I'm not clear what the goal is though.
  - yoavm 6mo ago
    I guess YouTube doesn't really have any competition, i.e it's not like you're going to switch to the competitor video platform and search there. Your only option is to watch through multiple other videos before finding the one you want, which is great for them.

jfoster 6mo ago

Really nice. Bookmarked it. Thank you for making it!

diceduckmonk 6mo ago

The irony with Google, er alphabet, a search company, is that the search feature are deeply flawed in their products. If you have thousands of resources in GCP, for example, the search is not super helpful.

WhyIsItAlwaysHN 6mo ago

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but this seems to just create the search string in the url, aka youtube search already supports these features. If people were really looking for exact title search they could write "term". It is definitely true that youtube's search is optimized for engagement, but going through a separate ui just to search it seems a bit redundant, especially if after I click search I have ti deal with youtube's UI.

WASDx 6mo ago

Similar site with same features: https://ä1.com/ https://xn--1-zfa.com/

moropex 6mo ago

been doing site:youtube.com on google for years because youtube search is that bad. the google video option here is a nice touch

Vachyas 6mo ago

I was hoping to finally see an advanced time filter so I could do something like "over 2 minutes" but it seems you've only got the same ones Youtube has (< 4 minutes, 4-20, and > 20). If it's an opaqueness restriction with the API or something, I'd like to suggest letting us at least combine the provided ones, so I could do something like (4-20) && (> 20) to get "over 4 minutes" which doesn't exist on Youtube but seems pretty useful. Another thing that would be useful is filter-by-channel since the search function within Youtube for searching a channel's uploads (using the search button on a channel's page) is a significantly nerfed version of their usual search function.

AlBugdy 6mo ago
I wish I could select "between 2.5 and 6 minutes". That search can translate to 2 queries to YouTube (<4 and 4-20), then the results can be combined and pruned to keep only those between 2.5 and 6. To get enough videos if there aren't enough after pruning, we could access the 2nd, 3rd and so on pages from the results. But I doubt YouTube will like 6 searches in a row.
- Vachyas 6mo ago
  Yea and I'm doubtful we'll see a service willing to do their own post-processing per-query while also being at the whim of Youtube's API (official or not). Ultimately, I would like these features to come to Youtube itself since there's a lot of nice features built into it that would be hard for a third-party to replicate without permission (such as playing videos inline on hover, with captions).
  - AlBugdy 6mo ago
    I doubt it will ever happen. This is Google after all, not a small company we can hope will get it right after a while. They've left the search parameters shitty for years. Google, arguably the most advanced search company ever, can't make an efficient filter for custom time ranges? They obviously can, but, as other comments have noted, they seem to think that good search is an anti-feature.
6mo ago

Duplicake 6mo ago

All this does it generate a search term from what you put in which you can do pretty easily yourself

nightrate_ai 6mo ago

[dead]

Alifatisk 6mo ago

I feel like we have reached a point where Youtube can just remove the search fields and let their algorithms do its thing. The last time I tried YTs search field was when I was trying to find an older video in my history. Nothing, even if I typed down the exact keywords. Nothing. Luckily, I found it through myactivity.google.com. Its actually kind of fascinating how a huge enterprise like Youtube can ruin a feature to the point that its actually useless. What they are good at is pushing irrelevant content everywhere, if I scroll to the bottom of my playlist, there is a suggestions feed. If I search something, after a couple of results, it turns into a suggestion feed. Even my subscribers feed is now a recommendations system at the top instead of just displaying in chronological order. If it wasn’t for their dominance in the market, I would have left long time ago. But I am stuck there, because the creators are there. uBlock and Sponsorblock is a bless. I am curious if there is alternative frontends to youtube that also allows me to sign in with my Googlw account and access all my playlist, likes, watch later etc.

loloquwowndueo 6mo ago
> I am stuck there, because the creators are there. Don’t make this mistake. You are not “stuck” - you’re making a choice. You can also choose to seek other materials elsewhere to stay entertained.
etothet 6mo ago
> Its actually kind of fascinating how a huge enterprise like Youtube can ruin a feature to the point that its actually useless. For the people in charge of engagement at YouTube, making search useless is a feature. If most people don’t get value from search then they’ll resign and be forced into following the algorithm, which is how Google wants you to consume YouTube. Similar reason why streaming providers keep making it more difficult to find your previously watched list.
nonethewiser 6mo ago
> I feel like we have reached a point where Youtube can just remove the search fields and let their algorithms do its thing. > The last time I tried YTs search field was when I was trying to find an older video in my history. Nothing, even if I typed down the exact keywords. Nothing. Luckily, I found it through myactivity.google.com. I have had a similar experience but it seems ridiculous to propose removing the search. It's not like its returning random results. It does generally work, even with the major failure points you describe.

xtiansimon 6mo ago

Ooh. I despise how YouTube removes videos from my saved videos list, “Unavailable videos were removed”. YouTube is crap.

carlosjobim 6mo ago

Would it be possible to toggle the search to exclude all videos with emojis in their title? I've noticed that every YouTube video containing one or more emojis in their title are AI generated spam.

jjallen 6mo ago

I’ve never been annoyed with YouTube search. Product is great as far as I’m concerned. Love YouTube all around.

joserohan 6mo ago

Looks neat!

rallypi 6mo ago

[flagged]

phendrenad2 6mo ago

I've just stopped using YouTube entirely. I'll watch the odd video that gets linked somewhere else, but I actively avoid going there. And this is as someone who used to pay for YouTube Premium. The site just doesn't value my time, and the company seems to think that I'll just accept watching whatever the algorithms decides I should watch. No thanks.

nonethewiser 6mo ago

This is the "normal science" of software engineering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science

loloktryagain 6mo ago

It literally just parses it into a regular YouTube search, this is vaporware trash

fighting_anakin 6mo ago

Thank god. I can't believe how horrible youtube's search functionality has gotten. I wonder if it's a function of scale or due to the new generation not engaging with old videos.

KellyCriterion 6mo ago

Can it sort by "upload date" which was removed by YT some weeks ago?

sorkhabi 6mo ago

I tested your app. It works well and is super fast. Well done.

spacec0wb0y 6mo ago

That's pretty useful. On the form, the "Date before" and "Date after" field naming is confusing. I'd expect the earlier date to display first and be called "from" rather than "Date after". You could probably restrict the date fields too so users can't pick dates in the future

japaco 6mo ago

Now this is a game changer for YouTube. I admit I'm still a YT platform junkie, but it's the only platform I scroll, so I give myself a little latitude. Nice job!