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
I remember watching video that contains certain word in the title. A minecraft contraption from a small channel (4 videos, 93 subs). I searched that word in the title. But youtube can't find it. Fortunately, I saved the world download that listed in the video with the name of the channel. So I searched the channel name + the word, it still can't find it.
So I searched only the channel name instead, in the search page. It works, and checking their videos, youtube mark one of them as watched. With the exact same title I searched. But it didn't show me in the history search. WTF youtube.
Youtube search is also weird in that it has a hard time finding something directly but will find it and put it it in the suggested videos feed after you have given up. 4 or 5 videos later. (shrugs) hell if I know.
But really, if I ever see a really good video I will download it. I try not to be too much of a digital horder, so it has to be really good. But their search has failed me enough times that it is worth it.
It doesn’t solve all the issues you mention, but YouTube Search Fixer [1] [2] is a browser extension that at least lets you remove irrelevant results, Shorts, live streams, and more from search. It makes results a bit more usable.
Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with YouTube Search Fixer. I’m currently working on https://maxxmod.com, a YouTube-focused browser extension that will include search improvements, so I’ve researched the ecosystem.
There are very efficient ways to block all ads, including YouTube ads. uBlock Origin browser extension is one of them. SponsorBlock browser extension would also skip over in-video ads.
Advanced search works. Also auto-skipped sponsored content, thumbnails directly from video content, no google account to use it, subscribe works, no ads and many more...
And good luck if the video you're looking for was related to something featured in a news report. No, youtube, I am not searching for 100 different local TV news stories about a viral video, when I type in the title of that viral video.
Nowadays if I want to see videos on a certain topic (not searching for a specific video), I usually ask an AI assistant. It uses web search with multiple related phrases and then picks the relevant ones out. I find this to be very effective right now, but of course in the future they could enshittify these assistants too.
Surely they just want to avoid straining their database so they put some "performance hacks" into their database instructions that they Ab/B-tested to "work" for 90 percent of people or something.
Meanwhile they could have just returned the titles of all your videos you have ever watched as a list and let your computer do the heavey lifting by searching through that text on the frontend only to fetch thumbnails and such for the final matches. I have a webservice with a table of 4000 lines or more and I can search it quasi instantly on my smartphone with a simple Javascript script hooked up to an input field.
> 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
Good thing I work on internal infrastructure and not pointing a gun to this guy's head to prevent him from scrolling down past the first three results or refining his query.
There is no "scrolling down past the first 3 results" because everything after that is recommended garbage that's unrelated to the search query. And as they already said, "refining the search query" doesn't work because it wouldn't find the video even if they searched its exact title.
Furthermore, search is fundamentally broken in that it translates your query and then tries to match every title in every language that is vaguely similar. Of course it still only gives you a handful of results before listing off unrelated recommendations in the "search results".
Search used to work great ~10 years ago and I used to find majority of content that way. These days it's so useless I don't really bother trying anymore.
Reading comments like this really shines a light on why Youtube is as bad as it is, I didn't expect the employees to be this out of touch with the product that their company makes.
It's gone massively downhill recently, noticeably so since the ability to sort by upload date was removed from the UI (and then very quickly removed from the API too). That was the final brick that prevented it from being literally unusable, now it's scroll and hope (and give up).
before:2024-08 after:2023-06 to the rescue? manual but works, even though on queries for "trending" keywords results will still be flooded with hits that should be filtered..
Nah, YouTube is absolutely shoving slop at users. They recently removed some of the search filters such as sorting by date, just to make it a little bit harder to find anything.
The search filters and the user interface in general on YouTube is garbage. you guys need to go back to the drawing board. it really is almost impossible to find a video, you have to sort through hundreds of AI slop clickbait videos in order to get to the one that you're actually interested in finding.
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)
I was curious after reading your comment and searched for sanic meme tshirt in the YouTube app. One result looked highly relevant, posted 4 days ago. It was a short, not a normal video mind you. Titled Official “Sanic” merchandise and having a picture of sanic and some dude’s face. Most of the rest of the results were from different dates, several ranging to years ago. But a lot of those other ones seemed to be about meme sanic as well at least.
I didn’t click on any of them to verify, lest YouTube decides that it should replace my whole YouTube home page with sonic fandom and sanic memes :P
I just put this into YouTube search and got results that contraindicate your claim¹:
> "sanic" the hedgehog
The quotes seem to shut down autocorrect
1: there's nothing that I see about the T-shirt, but the first result is titled "Sanic DA hedgeh0g". I will not be looking at what this video is. Several other results also include the word "sanic" in relation to the hedgehog.
Did you mean to respond to one of the sibling comments that are talking about autocorrect? I don’t understand what would be contradictory between what I said and what you said.
Apparently To Catch a Predator ("TCAP") makes YouTube think I've got a Spanish eating disorder and shoves a full screen "you're not alone" screen at you to call some eating disorder helpline.
Just last night, I wanted to find some antonyms of a word. So I did what I've done for decades and simply Googled that.
It insisted that I meant synonym, not antonym. Let that sink in for a moment.
Irrevocably substituting the antonym of antonym is the most balls-up, backwards, paradoxical "I'm from Google, and I'm here to help!" thing I can imagine happening to one word.
The quotes did nothing. The search results were all for synonyms, with the word synonym bolded in each excerpt.
---
(Hey, Google: It's fine to present to the user a suggestion, or a correction. I can even work with a system that assumes a correction is good and uses it on the first pass -- I might not like the extra step, but I'll get over it. Sometimes, that's actually useful.
But when your systems present a line that asks "Did you mean 'synonym'?" and then offers no option for the user to -- you know -- actually answer that question and reject the correction, then that's not good.
In fact, some descriptors that come to mind before "not good" in this context are "callous," "insulting," "recalcitrant," and "sadistic.")
There's another more hidden tool avail: right of the search type bar (images/news/books) there is a "search tools" menu where you can open "all results" and switch it to "verbatim".
Often times a good way to see another defunct relict of old, quality google: the empty-result-troll that would once upon a time pull out his fishing rod on click..
A tangent, but this is the second time in two days I've seen the word spelled "often times" instead of "oftentimes". Is this some variant spelling I don't know of? I see it more than "oftentimes" now, which I was hitherto convinced was the only correct spelling.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
I'm a heavy YT user and I don't have a problem either. I'm not sure what everybody is complaining about. Maybe its because I don't search on super specific things because I'm just looking for a larger topic, and I'm not sure if its actually returning all the best results because I don't know what it has to give me.
All this tool does is use YT search but makes it easier to include existing search switches to get more specific. (which I had forgotten about and I'm grateful the tool reminded me of them.
Really, if there's a problem, its not the search itself but how it prioritizes the search without the switches.
For me the problem is usually finding older videos. Youtube's search heavily favors newer videos to the point of completely hiding older ones even if using the exact video title. They've also removed the possibility of sorting results by date somewhere within last 6 months.
It works pretty well for me, but my searches are mostly automotive youtube or some tech stuff.
So if I want to know how to replace the water pump on my car, I type in the make and model and "water pump" and I usually find what I am looking for fairly easily.
That search (e.g. `ford fiesta water pump`) is consistent for me as well, except for an "explore more" section in the middle of the results.
So it does seem to be specific searches where it gives up after the first 7-10 results (or decides to show you some more related results after 20-30 additional unrelated results).
I wonder if this is algorithmic. E.g. people searching for a specific "how to replace/fix ..." are not going to click on results from their recommended feed, so the algorithm could have learned to keep those results fixed. However, someone looking for a piece of entertainment (trailer, book review, etc.) may be more inclined to click on other unrelated content, so those searches are more inclined to show results from the user's recommended feed.
>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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: Sorry I realised you were asking more about categorisation and not downloading.
——
The closest thing I can think of is Tube Archivist, which seems made for archiving large YouTube collections, including things like comments on videos.
I’ve had mixed luck with it and it’s a bit too heavy for my fairly limited needs. Youtube-dl hasn’t worked for me for the last month or so on it —- oddly enough I have a MeTube instance on the same physical machine (different VM) which is a lighter web UI for yt-dlp and which is still working fine. That’s Youtube’s fault I assume and not the fault of Tube Archivist.
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, a YouTube-focused browser extension, so I’ve researched the ecosystem.
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.
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.)
This is also the way I use YouTube and is the main thing I made Control Panel for YouTube [1] for (well, that plus globally hiding Shorts and removing all the unwanted recommendations everywhere) - my Subscriptions page acts like an inbox of unwatched videos and everything else is hidden (most recently: the new "Most relevant" section and "Collaborations" videos with channels I'm not subscribed to).
My Subscriptions page currently has 15 videos above the fold, 5 of which are from the last 12 hours. The oldest video in that first page is 2 weeks old, and if I turn the extension off I need to press Page Down 17 times to reach it in the vanilla YouTube interface.
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).
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:
My subscription feed now has a row of 3 videos labeled "priority", then a row of 3 videos labeled "latest", then a row of "Shorts," then it appears to continue on with the "latest" but there's no label.
This is from memory so I may have got something wrong. And I could be an A/B test subject as this has been new as of a few weeks. There's also a "More..." fold or two in there.
This pattern does not represent how I use the product. I do not watch shorts and I don't know how or why they mark things as a priority. I want to know what's newest and the time ordered list being deprioritized in the UI and fractured makes that worse.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
Google of today would absolutely get steamrolled by any of the search engines it used to compete against. Now granted the web of today is mostly a toxic waste pile vs more of a cluttered basement back then.
I've had ctrl+f work for searching within the transcript on the page recently. I assumed it wouldn't due to lazy loading, but was surprised because the video I tried it on was quite long.
filmot.com exists too (found it on here, currently can't get past the cloudflare captcha to double check), but I have no idea how much of youtube's transcripts it has archived.
> I've had ctrl+f work for searching within the transcript on the page recently.
I assumed it wouldn't due to lazy loading, but was surprised because the video I tried it on was quite long.
That was previously the case for me, none of the results outside of the current view would show up.
I just went to try, and I noticed that you can actually search in a transcript now!? There's a search bar
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.
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.
-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
You have that causal relationship flipped around. Content is being optimized for clickbait engagement because that's the only way to survive, many creators have talked about this.
The algorithms are pushing garbage clickbait and AI slop while cutting off all other discovery avenues like search, this is obvious on youtube because the "search results" only contain 3 of those and then it's just more unrelated recommended garbage, the intent there couldn't be more clear.
Rossmann talked about how his repair & data recovery business website that had tons of honest, professional, high quality content for years suddenly dropped off Google and it was killing his business, but when he followed Gemini's advice and recreated the website with AI slop it started ranking #1 within weeks.
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.
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.
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/)
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...
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.
Most definitely not the one he's talking about. But, I'll mention my extension. It exposes the hidden date operators through Youtube's search filter menu, allows searching comments and finding the most popular video's from a channel within the last year, etc.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
What got me really mad is searching your own history. There's this "search watch history" on the https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
I remember watching video that contains certain word in the title. A minecraft contraption from a small channel (4 videos, 93 subs). I searched that word in the title. But youtube can't find it. Fortunately, I saved the world download that listed in the video with the name of the channel. So I searched the channel name + the word, it still can't find it.
So I searched only the channel name instead, in the search page. It works, and checking their videos, youtube mark one of them as watched. With the exact same title I searched. But it didn't show me in the history search. WTF youtube.
Youtube search is also weird in that it has a hard time finding something directly but will find it and put it it in the suggested videos feed after you have given up. 4 or 5 videos later. (shrugs) hell if I know.
But really, if I ever see a really good video I will download it. I try not to be too much of a digital horder, so it has to be really good. But their search has failed me enough times that it is worth it.
Google.com is a lot better at searching YouTube than YouTube is at searching YouTube
I prefer googling in duckduckgo
gemini @YouTube is decent too.
Amazon is the same now. I can't find books on it that I know for sure exist on it. It always pushes something else first.
>I remember watching video that contains certain word in the title
You could use youtube-dl to download the all automatic subtitles those videos and then search.
I seem to remember at one point there was a bug (or "bug") where watches wouldn't be tracked if you used an adblocker.
It doesn’t solve all the issues you mention, but YouTube Search Fixer [1] [2] is a browser extension that at least lets you remove irrelevant results, Shorts, live streams, and more from search. It makes results a bit more usable.
Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with YouTube Search Fixer. I’m currently working on https://maxxmod.com, a YouTube-focused browser extension that will include search improvements, so I’ve researched the ecosystem.
[1] Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-suite...
[2] Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/search-fixer-for-yo...
YouTube search filter is godsend.
> forced to watch ... 3 ads
There are very efficient ways to block all ads, including YouTube ads. uBlock Origin browser extension is one of them. SponsorBlock browser extension would also skip over in-video ads.
https://freetubeapp.io/
Advanced search works. Also auto-skipped sponsored content, thumbnails directly from video content, no google account to use it, subscribe works, no ads and many more...
And good luck if the video you're looking for was related to something featured in a news report. No, youtube, I am not searching for 100 different local TV news stories about a viral video, when I type in the title of that viral video.
on top of that it pushes worst creators (who are the biggest thanks to yt) content.
Nowadays if I want to see videos on a certain topic (not searching for a specific video), I usually ask an AI assistant. It uses web search with multiple related phrases and then picks the relevant ones out. I find this to be very effective right now, but of course in the future they could enshittify these assistants too.
They want to push down you throat whatever their algo decides.
What sort of API do you use to search?
Surely they just want to avoid straining their database so they put some "performance hacks" into their database instructions that they Ab/B-tested to "work" for 90 percent of people or something.
Meanwhile they could have just returned the titles of all your videos you have ever watched as a list and let your computer do the heavey lifting by searching through that text on the frontend only to fetch thumbnails and such for the final matches. I have a webservice with a table of 4000 lines or more and I can search it quasi instantly on my smartphone with a simple Javascript script hooked up to an input field.
Try skipvids search it removes all the noise, including shorts and ai slop
> 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.
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.
Good thing I work on internal infrastructure and not pointing a gun to this guy's head to prevent him from scrolling down past the first three results or refining his query.
There is no "scrolling down past the first 3 results" because everything after that is recommended garbage that's unrelated to the search query. And as they already said, "refining the search query" doesn't work because it wouldn't find the video even if they searched its exact title.
Furthermore, search is fundamentally broken in that it translates your query and then tries to match every title in every language that is vaguely similar. Of course it still only gives you a handful of results before listing off unrelated recommendations in the "search results".
Search used to work great ~10 years ago and I used to find majority of content that way. These days it's so useless I don't really bother trying anymore.
Reading comments like this really shines a light on why Youtube is as bad as it is, I didn't expect the employees to be this out of touch with the product that their company makes.
For real. Trying to find a specific video on youtube is a very similar experience to searching for legit cables and adapters on Amazon.
What a weird comment. Given that you clearly don't use YouTube, why did you feel the need to engage?
There are no results past the first three videos.
It's gone massively downhill recently, noticeably so since the ability to sort by upload date was removed from the UI (and then very quickly removed from the API too). That was the final brick that prevented it from being literally unusable, now it's scroll and hope (and give up).
before:2024-08 after:2023-06 to the rescue? manual but works, even though on queries for "trending" keywords results will still be flooded with hits that should be filtered..
Nah, YouTube is absolutely shoving slop at users. They recently removed some of the search filters such as sorting by date, just to make it a little bit harder to find anything.
The search filters and the user interface in general on YouTube is garbage. you guys need to go back to the drawing board. it really is almost impossible to find a video, you have to sort through hundreds of AI slop clickbait videos in order to get to the one that you're actually interested in finding.
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)
I was curious after reading your comment and searched for sanic meme tshirt in the YouTube app. One result looked highly relevant, posted 4 days ago. It was a short, not a normal video mind you. Titled Official “Sanic” merchandise and having a picture of sanic and some dude’s face. Most of the rest of the results were from different dates, several ranging to years ago. But a lot of those other ones seemed to be about meme sanic as well at least.
I didn’t click on any of them to verify, lest YouTube decides that it should replace my whole YouTube home page with sonic fandom and sanic memes :P
I just put this into YouTube search and got results that contraindicate your claim¹:
> "sanic" the hedgehog
The quotes seem to shut down autocorrect
1: there's nothing that I see about the T-shirt, but the first result is titled "Sanic DA hedgeh0g". I will not be looking at what this video is. Several other results also include the word "sanic" in relation to the hedgehog.
Did you mean to respond to one of the sibling comments that are talking about autocorrect? I don’t understand what would be contradictory between what I said and what you said.
This is exactly the type of criteria that WhatsApp search struggles with. It basically assumes the user does not know how to type.
Apparently To Catch a Predator ("TCAP") makes YouTube think I've got a Spanish eating disorder and shoves a full screen "you're not alone" screen at you to call some eating disorder helpline.
Just put the term in quotes "sanic the hedgeheg" ignore the suggestions and press enter to see the real results.
Google no longer cares much about quotes. Sometimes it’ll take them seriously and sometimes not.
Indeed.
Just last night, I wanted to find some antonyms of a word. So I did what I've done for decades and simply Googled that.
It insisted that I meant synonym, not antonym. Let that sink in for a moment.
Irrevocably substituting the antonym of antonym is the most balls-up, backwards, paradoxical "I'm from Google, and I'm here to help!" thing I can imagine happening to one word.
The quotes did nothing. The search results were all for synonyms, with the word synonym bolded in each excerpt.
---
(Hey, Google: It's fine to present to the user a suggestion, or a correction. I can even work with a system that assumes a correction is good and uses it on the first pass -- I might not like the extra step, but I'll get over it. Sometimes, that's actually useful.
But when your systems present a line that asks "Did you mean 'synonym'?" and then offers no option for the user to -- you know -- actually answer that question and reject the correction, then that's not good.
In fact, some descriptors that come to mind before "not good" in this context are "callous," "insulting," "recalcitrant," and "sadistic.")
There's another more hidden tool avail: right of the search type bar (images/news/books) there is a "search tools" menu where you can open "all results" and switch it to "verbatim". Often times a good way to see another defunct relict of old, quality google: the empty-result-troll that would once upon a time pull out his fishing rod on click..
A tangent, but this is the second time in two days I've seen the word spelled "often times" instead of "oftentimes". Is this some variant spelling I don't know of? I see it more than "oftentimes" now, which I was hitherto convinced was the only correct spelling.
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.
There's a whole list of search operators: https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/#li...
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.
if there's no way to successfully attest competency then you are allocating your time poorly.
You should add this option to filter shorts: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&sp=CAI%253D
Also, related project: 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.
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.
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.
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.)
I’m suddenly grateful that I use my iPad, so they can’t use that signal on me.
They can see how long you stop scrolling, too.
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?
I'm a heavy YT user and I don't have a problem either. I'm not sure what everybody is complaining about. Maybe its because I don't search on super specific things because I'm just looking for a larger topic, and I'm not sure if its actually returning all the best results because I don't know what it has to give me.
All this tool does is use YT search but makes it easier to include existing search switches to get more specific. (which I had forgotten about and I'm grateful the tool reminded me of them.
Really, if there's a problem, its not the search itself but how it prioritizes the search without the switches.
Examples:
- `dune book review`
- `sierpinski triangle`
- `full adder` -- better results, but includes an unrelated "previously watched" section
One of the main issues I've encountered is that when searching for something you generally see:
- 7 or so relevant results
- shorts (which I'm not interested in)
- "people also watched" / "previously watched" results -- I'm not interested in that, I just want what I'm looking for
- "channels new to you" -- can include results, so maybe okay
- "explore more" -- mostly irrelevant results to what I'm looking for
- "previously watched" -- may be fine, but mostly unrelated
After the first 7-10 results it generally becomes unusable.
For me the problem is usually finding older videos. Youtube's search heavily favors newer videos to the point of completely hiding older ones even if using the exact video title. They've also removed the possibility of sorting results by date somewhere within last 6 months.
It works pretty well for me, but my searches are mostly automotive youtube or some tech stuff.
So if I want to know how to replace the water pump on my car, I type in the make and model and "water pump" and I usually find what I am looking for fairly easily.
That search (e.g. `ford fiesta water pump`) is consistent for me as well, except for an "explore more" section in the middle of the results.
So it does seem to be specific searches where it gives up after the first 7-10 results (or decides to show you some more related results after 20-30 additional unrelated results).
I wonder if this is algorithmic. E.g. people searching for a specific "how to replace/fix ..." are not going to click on results from their recommended feed, so the algorithm could have learned to keep those results fixed. However, someone looking for a piece of entertainment (trailer, book review, etc.) may be more inclined to click on other unrelated content, so those searches are more inclined to show results from the user's recommended feed.
>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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know it's really really loud in your echo chamber but short form videos are extremely popular.
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.
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.
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.
This is great!
ok thanks!, i never knew there was an rss feed for each channel/users... that does open up solutions.
EDIT: Sorry I realised you were asking more about categorisation and not downloading.
——
The closest thing I can think of is Tube Archivist, which seems made for archiving large YouTube collections, including things like comments on videos.
I’ve had mixed luck with it and it’s a bit too heavy for my fairly limited needs. Youtube-dl hasn’t worked for me for the last month or so on it —- oddly enough I have a MeTube instance on the same physical machine (different VM) which is a lighter web UI for yt-dlp and which is still working fine. That’s Youtube’s fault I assume and not the fault of Tube Archivist.
https://www.tubearchivist.com/
https://github.com/alexta69/metube
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, a YouTube-focused browser extension, so I’ve researched the ecosystem.
[1] Website: https://pockettube.io
[2] Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-subsc...
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.
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.)
This is also the way I use YouTube and is the main thing I made Control Panel for YouTube [1] for (well, that plus globally hiding Shorts and removing all the unwanted recommendations everywhere) - my Subscriptions page acts like an inbox of unwatched videos and everything else is hidden (most recently: the new "Most relevant" section and "Collaborations" videos with channels I'm not subscribed to).
My Subscriptions page currently has 15 videos above the fold, 5 of which are from the last 12 hours. The oldest video in that first page is 2 weeks old, and if I turn the extension off I need to press Page Down 17 times to reach it in the vanilla YouTube interface.
[1] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
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).
Skipvids.com recreates the old youtube subscription page experience pretty well.
I use https://porjo.github.io/freshtube/ almost daily. It requires a Google API key but only have to set it once.
you can use lurkkit.com to build your own chronological youtube feed with only your subscriptions
That's ... exactly what the subscriptions feed does right now?
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:
My subscription feed now has a row of 3 videos labeled "priority", then a row of 3 videos labeled "latest", then a row of "Shorts," then it appears to continue on with the "latest" but there's no label.
This is from memory so I may have got something wrong. And I could be an A/B test subject as this has been new as of a few weeks. There's also a "More..." fold or two in there.
This pattern does not represent how I use the product. I do not watch shorts and I don't know how or why they mark things as a priority. I want to know what's newest and the time ordered list being deprioritized in the UI and fractured makes that worse.
Nice work! Does this use the YouTube data API behind the scenes? 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.
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?
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!
Hostile engineering
Maybe, I'm not clear what the goal is though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Similar site with same features: https://xn--1-zfa.com/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
Google of today would absolutely get steamrolled by any of the search engines it used to compete against. Now granted the web of today is mostly a toxic waste pile vs more of a cluttered basement back then.
> I still can’t believe they don’t let you search videos within a channel for example.
Uh, yeah, they do.
https://www.youtube.com/@PuddleOfMuddTV/search?query=blurry
> Or search within transcripts.
Yeah, I also wish this were possible using the normal CTRL+F just doesn't work properly
I've had ctrl+f work for searching within the transcript on the page recently. I assumed it wouldn't due to lazy loading, but was surprised because the video I tried it on was quite long.
filmot.com exists too (found it on here, currently can't get past the cloudflare captcha to double check), but I have no idea how much of youtube's transcripts it has archived.
> I've had ctrl+f work for searching within the transcript on the page recently. I assumed it wouldn't due to lazy loading, but was surprised because the video I tried it on was quite long.
That was previously the case for me, none of the results outside of the current view would show up.
I just went to try, and I noticed that you can actually search in a transcript now!? There's a search bar
Author must clearly never use porn sites like xvideos or PornHub, if they think YouTube's search is what "barely works".
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.
been doing site:youtube.com on google for years because youtube search is that bad. the google video option here is a nice touch
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.
Do you automate your takeout so the DB is relatively fresh?
The worst offender is Apple Music search. Sad because the service is great
Really nice. Bookmarked it. Thank you for making it!
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.
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
-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
You have that causal relationship flipped around. Content is being optimized for clickbait engagement because that's the only way to survive, many creators have talked about this.
The algorithms are pushing garbage clickbait and AI slop while cutting off all other discovery avenues like search, this is obvious on youtube because the "search results" only contain 3 of those and then it's just more unrelated recommended garbage, the intent there couldn't be more clear.
Rossmann talked about how his repair & data recovery business website that had tons of honest, professional, high quality content for years suddenly dropped off Google and it was killing his business, but when he followed Gemini's advice and recreated the website with AI slop it started ranking #1 within weeks.
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.
Hey great. Need the same for amazon ^^
Yeah the only reason I still use YouTube is because μBlock Origin still works great.
Downfall of youtube is one word: shorts.
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?
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.
Can't remember where I got them, but there's some uBO rules that really help on that front:
Also got some other rules from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44332976This all shouldn't be necessary, but alas...
You're basically right, it's just a UI for the old search filters, at least for the ones that still work today.
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...
Enshittification is the reason
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.
What extension exposes the hidden filters???
Most definitely not the one he's talking about. But, I'll mention my extension. It exposes the hidden date operators through Youtube's search filter menu, allows searching comments and finding the most popular video's from a channel within the last year, etc.
https://github.com/polywock/youtubeEye
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.
> 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)
> 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?
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?
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)
I agree, YouTube search is completely useless when we really need it. Especially with fizzy search!
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.
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.
Really wish there was an alternative. Especially to the manipulation of it all by YouTube (demonetization and other tactics).
It works perfectly fine.
Cable TV->enshittification->YouTube to the rescue->enshittification->???
Colour me surpised.
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.
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!
I am forced to use Yandex just to find stuff Google or DDG never shows anymore.
Interesting. Do you have some examples?
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.