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Comments (136)

• Vachyas
  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.
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  VenezuelaFree
  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 frustratingIt got so bad that even searching the full tittle of the video doesnt show you that video haha
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  wincy
  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)
• hexage1814
  You should add this option to filter shorts: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&sp=CAI%253DAlso, 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.
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  loveparade
  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.
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  danpalmer
  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?
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  atum47
  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.
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  throw7
  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.
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  ddtaylor
  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.
• Esn024
  Nice work! Does this use the YouTube data API behind the scenes? https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/search/listAlso, 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 language3) Search only for videos that have subtitles in a specific language4) 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.
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  gbro3n
  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!
• zmmmmm
  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.
• WASDx
  Similar site with same features: https://xn--1-zfa.com/
• dawnerd
  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.
• jdprgm
  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.
• diceduckmonk
  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.
• gall
  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.
• moropex
  been doing site:youtube.com on google for years because youtube search is that bad. the google video option here is a nice touch
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  6thbit
  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.
• phyzix5761
  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.
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  cj00
  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.
• jfoster
  Really nice. Bookmarked it. Thank you for making it!
• rvnx
  The worst offender is Apple Music search. Sad because the service is great
• perching_aix
  Author must clearly never use porn sites like xvideos or PornHub, if they think YouTube's search is what "barely works".
• WhyIsItAlwaysHN
  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.
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  tcherasaro
  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.
• micw
  Hey great. Need the same for amazon ^^
• RRRA
  Yeah the only reason I still use YouTube is because μBlock Origin still works great.
• aaa_aaa
  Downfall of youtube is one word: shorts.
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  dev1ycan
  This is just adding the hidden filters such asbefore:[date]: Finds videos uploaded before a specific date.Example: space exploration before:2020-01-01after:[date]: Finds videos uploaded after a specific date.Example: tech news after:2024-01-01To an UI, right?
• swrly
  I agree, YouTube search is completely useless when we really need it. Especially with fizzy search!
• BoppreH
  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.
• ankitsanghi
  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.
• anon
  undefined
• SilverElfin
  Really wish there was an alternative. Especially to the manipulation of it all by YouTube (demonetization and other tactics).
• dbbk
  It works perfectly fine.
• storus
  Cable TV->enshittification->YouTube to the rescue->enshittification->???
• oyebenny
  Colour me surpised.
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  moralestapia
  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.
• jmyeet
  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.
• LeonTing1010
  [flagged]