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

But I need to remember which channel I watched? Maybe I'm missing something, but in my eyes it would make it tremendously more useful if I didn't have to specify channel.

Then tried on GeoWizard channel (English) and it worked great.

There is a somewhat related tool called Youglish that works on subtitles, it's great for checking the pronunciation or usage of a word or expression in many languages, but it's based on a curated list of channels with known good subtitles. I thought yours could be a great complement to this as it works directly on the audio.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Tercosmicqueen

I've not got a legit use for it right now but the few example searches I thought up returned the videos I was thinking of

Nice work!

I'm guessing you need a specific channel as a way of getting a list of videos, then pulling the captioning, then searching? (That's the only reason I could think of for the channel restriction, which unfortunately removes 90% of the utility)

[1] https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A%252F%...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3denP7wX2XU&t=296s

VideoMentions is addressing the need-gap: 'Searching YouTube videos with transcript'[1] posted on my problem validation forum.

I appreciate that rather than just building a browser add-on to search individual video, You've built a business use case for brand monitoring. I hope you get profitable enough to afford the compute necessary to monitor top channels without having to explicitly mention them.

You're welcomed to explain how it addresses that problem at needgap, So those who need it can find it easily.

[1]: https://needgap.com/problems/88-searching-youtube-videos-wit...

Also you can search individual videos by showing transcript and pressing ctrl-f

That's why VideoMentions Search exists. It provides a way to search the videos within a YouTube channel to reliably find spoken word matches (and it includes matches in the title & description, too).

Thanks for checking out my project! Please let me know if I can answer any questions about it.

VideoMentions Search is built entirely using serverless technologies, so it should scale really well. There's no single server or database to act as a bottleneck. When you perform a search, your browser fires off a number of network requests to serverless function API endpoints that fetch the data from YouTube, then return a response. So if you do an "All time" search on a channel with 2 million videos, your laptop fan may kick on while your browser works hard firing off thousand and thousands of requests until it's fetched all 2 million videos, you run out of memory, or you manually hit the "Cancel" button - whichever comes first :)

Your regex idea is interesting, and I'll consider implementing some more complex rules like that if enough people request it. For now, my answer would be to either perform separate searches (like one for "yc" and another for "ycombinator"), or perform one search, then use ctrl/cmd+f to search within the matches displayed on the page.

Thanks for checking out my project, and for the great feedback!

https://phrasefinder.net

I don’t know if it even works anymore and I’m sure the code is atrocious. But I remember that I would just scrape YouTube pages for video IDs, and then use an API that returned video captions for a given ID [1]. I could see how OP would do something similar.

[1] https://pypi.org/project/youtube-transcript-api/

The search is scoped by channel, so the closed-caption files for all the videos in the channel are downloaded and searched for on the fly.

Edit: Wow, thanks to dev tools, I can see that the website is downloading the transcript and metadata for all the videos from the channel to the client. So the search is happening client-side!!

My app does as much of the fetching and match finding work that it can client-side. For the few things that can't be done client-side, my app calls serverless function API endpoints to fetch the YouTube channel and video data it needs. Here are the tricks I'm using to make it fast:

- As soon as the "Channel URL" field loses focus, I start fetching the most recent 30 videos on that channel in the background. This way, by the time the user enters the keyword and date range, I've already fetched some (maybe even all!) of the data ahead of time, which means less wait time for them.

- Once a specific video's data (title, description, transcript, etc.) has been fetched once, it is saved in memory. All other searches the user performs from that point on will pull the video data from the in-memory cache, if it's there. Otherwise, it will fall back to fetching the video data over the network. This in-memory caching makes subsequent searches within the same date range (or a shorter date range) take <1 second.

- Network requests to fetch video data are processed concurrently rather than one at a time. So the browser fires off as many as it can in parallel to get them all resolved as quickly as possible.

- As soon as any matches are found, the UI updates to show the user. This way, the user can start scrolling through the matches and reviewing them while the search is still in progress– they don't have to wait until it finishes to start interacting with the matches.

Thanks for checking out my project, and for the kind words! I appreciate it.

Thanks for checking out my project! :)

Thanks for checking out my project!

That's why I built VideoMentions Search. It pulls in the transcript for every video within the channel and date range you selected and shows you any and all matches.

Also - even when a Google search does work to find a video based on spoken words, all you're given is a link to that video's page. You can't see all the times that keyword was mentioned within the video and click on one of those mentions to jump to that exact moment in the video, like you can with VideoMentions Search.

If Google/YouTube added those capabilities, then VideoMentions Search would be irrelevant. In the meantime though, I think it's a useful free tool for quickly finding spoken word matches within a specific channel.

Thanks for checking it out!

Thanks for checking out my project!

VideoMentions Search allows you to specify the channel URL, keywords and date range, then does all that hard work for you, quickly locating all videos that contain those keywords.

I hope that's helpful. Thanks for checking out my project!

Thanks for checking out my project!

Potentially future updates could search a logged in user's history?

I could update VideoMentions Search to allow users to select multiple channels, and then perform the search across all of those. Like maybe maybe auto-importing all the channels they're subscribed to could be useful. One way or another though, it would still require selecting specific channels to search within. For this first iteration, I just kept things simple with a single channel URL input. Despite that limitation, I still think it's a useful tool, though; I plan to use it often myself.

Thanks for checking it out!

Thanks for checking it out!

Thanks for checking out my project!

Thanks for checking out my project!

Thanks for checking it out!