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How are you sourcing the text for the videos? This search [1] grabs some results for my query, but it does miss this [2] video which contains the searched keyword multiple times, and the video's subtitles indicates as much.

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

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

VideoMentions scrapes the video page markup and pulls out the "baseUrl" for the English caption track. It converts that XML caption track into JSON, then searches it for keyword matches. You're right that this particular search for "toxic" should find several spoken word matches, but it doesn't. It seems like the tool isn't able to access the captions data for that video for some reason. I made a note of this bug, and I'll look into fixing it. Thanks for pointing it out, and for checking out VideoMentions Search!

yt-dlp [1] has command-line options to download only the captions of a video, in available languages, if you want to skip the scraping for the link.

I built something similar [2] for a slightly different use case. I wanted to be able to search through all Ram Dass talks in the 'Here and Now' podcast series on YT. I'm obviously not as skilled at CSS. :) And the display of timestamps is still a bit shaky, but for me it fulfills its purpose.

Since I'm able to preload all caption files ahead of time, I'm just using pcregrep for the search which does a pretty good job.

[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp [2] https://ramdass-search.net

> - You remember watching a video where a certain topic was discussed, and now you're trying to remember which video it was to rewatch it.

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.

I'm sure it would be, but then you're indexing whole youtube with respect to words spoken in each video. A thing that Google, arguably the best organization when it comes to indexing stuff, is working on.

Yes, my thoughts exactly. If Google decides that it's going to revamp YouTube search to include spoken word/transcription matches, that would make VideoMentions Search irrelevant– and I'd be okay with that!

In the meantime, I think this is a useful free tool for quickly finding spoken word matches within specific channels.

Thanks for checking it out!

Yeah, YouTube doesn't provide a way to search all of YouTube based on the spoken words in videos.

I could update VideoMentions Search to allow users to select multiple channels, and then perform the search across all of those (maybe importing all the channels they're subscribed to could be handy... ). One way or another though, it would still require selecting specific channels to search within. That limitation notwithstanding, I still think it's a useful tool, though!

Thanks for checking it out!

Could you do a search based on their watch history if they have it enabled?

That'd certainly be useful

This is a cool idea! It wouldn't apply to people who want to search all the videos on a given channel for specific keywords (including those they haven't watched). I can see it being useful for folks trying to locate a specific video they remember watching in the past, though.

One consideration is that getting the user's watch history would likely require calls to the YouTube API. So that means I would have to make this a paid service in order to offset the code of those API requests. The beautiful thing about the current iteration is that it doesn't rely on YouTube's API at all. By scraping YouTube pages and leveraging a few NPM packages, I'm currently able to offer free and unrestricted access to it.

If enough people request that ability though, I'll consider incorporating it.

Thanks for checking out my project and for the great idea!

If you're ambitious, I think a compelling rap genius style social media site could be built based on people commenting on specific segments of YouTube talks (and podcasts, whatever). Rap genius (now genius.com) seemed to be doing something really novel, but then....something happened. But I think the idea is rich with opportunity.

This project is doing a variation of it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31527544

My vision of it would require some pretty strong UI skills, or maybe nowadays it's not so hard to accomplish impressive things.

Sadly YouTube API doesn't allow you to retrieve user's history, so you need to scrape that aswell.

I created a exactly that project: https://github.com/victor141516/YourArch

I get why you wouldn’t be able to index all of YouTube, that’s a big ask.

However, I don’t use YouTube enough to mess w channels much. I’m usually searching on a particular topic.

For example, “drop ceiling panel replacement.”

Perhaps you could help users limit the channel scope by making an intelligent channel selection by keyword.

So I would put in “home improvement,” and you could choose some appropriate channels to search for my search terms.

Hey @bredren! Yeah, I agree that this makes for a nice user experience. This is how the paid VideoMentions.com service works- users can search for channels by name or keywords, without the need to paste in URLs. It looks like this: https://cloudup.com/cUgKqErcx8G

That auto-complete lookup requires spending a finite number of API calls, though, which is why it’s restricted to customers and not available on this freely accessible VideoMentions Search page.

Thanks for checking it out, and for your feedback!

Ah! Okay. Makes sense. Thanks for the reply, maybe I’ll try out the pro version.

Your pricing model is really solid. I can see how useful this is to people or companies with a brand.

I don’t have one of those, but I can also easily imagine wanting to find “that one video that I watched a while ago” in some topical “power tools” channel where they talked about “parallel battery” tech, without recalling the channel name. If I really wanted to find that again in order to buy the tool, it’s easily worth $5. And then I have a whole month to chase down other vaguely-recalled references!

Well done. I hope this post gets the attention it deserves. You have solved a problem that many people have, and have griped about. Companies and people who maintain brands need to know about it. And your free tier (which I assume is funded by the paid options) has already helped me find something I’d been after for a while. I want this to stick around.

Do you cache the channel, search term, and results for faster more efficient responses later?

Hey @hanniabu! I do client-side in-memory caching of videos data, only. No server-side caching. In fact, there is no database involved at all- the client-side 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!

>I do client-side in-memory caching of videos data, only.

This works only if the user does not navigate from and back to your website or refresh the page, but if they do, you make the same api calls all over again. You should set HTTP Cache-Control headers in your response from the server, so that the browser knows that it can serve that data from its cache and does not need to make those requests again. You would then probably not need the client-side in-memory cache at all.

I could do this, but it would introduce other cache invalidation issues. Take this sequence of events, for example:

* The user performs a search, reviews the matches, then closes the browser tab.

* The title or description for one or more of the videos on that YouTube channel are updated.

* 45 minutes later, the user remembers that they wanted to search for something else on that same YouTube channel. They return to VideoMentions Search to perform another search.

If I had sent cache-control headers in the first response telling the browser to cache the results of those HTTP requests, they would not be refetched for subsequent requests and the user would potentially be shown incorrect matches.

By fetching the data fresh whenever the user opens VideoMentions Search in a new browser tab, I guarantee that they're getting correct matches based on the titles, descriptions and spoken words that the videos have at the time the search is performed.

So as it's implemented currently, I'm choosing to take a performance hit in exchange for improved accuracy. And I'm comfortable with that tradeoff since searches seem decently speedy to me when I use the tool.

Thanks for your thoughts, and the alternative client-side caching idea!

They don't offer direct search, but isn't this what "key moments" is in search results? Try eg how to change a lightbulb.

I believe SeekToAction works even if the uploader didn't put chapters in. This was a relatively recent update, to make it fully automatic. So it's presumably doing some audio/video analysis to figure it out. All you need to do is tell Google how to seek your video (so it also works with non youtube videos too).

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2021/07/new-way-ke...

Oh, cool! I hadn't heard of the Key Moments/SeekToAction feature before. I'll have to dig in and explore that a bit. Thanks for the tip!

I tried on this channel which is in Spanish [1] and it returned very fast with no results.

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

Hey @jobigoud! Yeah, currently VideoMentions only uses the auto-generated English video transcriptions when searching for matches. If there was enough demand, it could be expanded to support other languages. Doing so would add complexity and would make searches take much longer, though. I'd probably need to add more UI fields to allow users to select the languages to target. Could be done, though!

Yes, youglish.com is a neat tool! I stumbled upon it when looking around for a way to search YouTube videos based on spoken words.

Thanks for checking it out! :)

Congratulations on the launch!

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...

This looks super cool! There's a need for tools to make the millions of videos on the web actually useful for people like me who would much rather skim search and read than watch. Bravo to you for making a stab at it!

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)

Hey @loxias! Yes, you're exactly right - VideoMentions scrapes the video page markup and pulls out the "baseUrl" for the English caption track. It converts that XML caption track into JSON, then searches it for keyword matches.

YouTube doesn't provide a way to search all of YouTube based on spoken words, unfortunately. Still, I think this is a useful tool for quickly locating spoken word matches within a certain channel.

Some Hacker News commenters have suggested that I could auto-import all the channels the user is subscribed to, or get videos from their watch history, which are interesting ideas. For this first iteration, I kept things simple with a single "Channel URL" input.

Thanks for checking out my project, and for your feedback!

> Still, I think this is a useful tool for quickly locating spoken word matches within a certain channel.

Absolutely, and I agree, however,.... it necessitates that the user use or understand "channels". When I went to your site my first thought was "what the hell's a channel?" ;-)

But yeah, for whatever percentage of youtube users use channels, I see this having a lot of use. My totally unsolicited advice is that you'll have to find some way to remove the channel requirement. Perhaps suggesting channels based on the search terms. (I've seen your other comments about adding features to a paid version)

I haven't yet managed to get VideoMentions to actually work, but that's fine, I assume you're getting hugged to death. :D Shipping anything is hard, and congrats for that.

"I assume you're getting hugged to death" -- lol

Yeah, maybe I'll consider having two versions of search - one version for paid customers that allows you to search for YouTube channels by name/keyword and allows you to search across all the channels you're subscribed to or across all the videos in your watch history, and a second version that's free and similar to the current iteration.

VideoMentions Search should work just fine for you - there is no server and no database behind it. When searches are performed, serverless functions are called that source data from YouTube, then return a response to the client. So it should scale just fine.

Can you please visit this link, click the button to perform a search and let me know if you see results pop up? https://videomentions.com/search?channelUrl=https%253A%252F%...

I'd love to know if you don't, or if you see any errors in the browser console. Thanks again for your thoughts on it!

(firstly, that search works fine and returns very quickly! Now that I know it's client side, I've been able to do a few searches of my own to see how it works. It works well! The ones I did earlier were looking at a large channel "PBS Newshour" for various news topics over "All time")

(secondly, DO consider putting your email address on your HN profile!)

Whoa! Client side!?! Far out man, far out. To be honest, I was a little unimpressed before -- but didn't feel like "your idea is _brilliant_, but implementation leaves a lot to be desired. makes me want to try my hand at writing my own." would be a constructive comment. ;-)

But, knowing this is all done client side?? I tip my hat, that's *clever*! The whole site could be a static and local set of files? I had no idea things like this could even be done without a server or other real program to do the work. (though now that I think about it, I have an idea how, duh. YouTube exposes a JS API I bet, so you can have the client call it each time, do the searching work, &c.)

That avoids scalability issues and probably legal ones as well! What a game changer...

Was there an existing framework used for building client side web apps like this, or did you roll your own?

While I've got you, and I admit that graphical UIs are ... an area where my opinion should carry no weight (I'm the sort who.. doesn't use icons, and when writing personal tools, the "user interface" is positional parameters to a command line program ;-)), here are some suggestions:

* The UI, while clean and unbusy (yay!!), feels BLOATED with white space. Why do the results occupy this tiny narrow column, forcing me to scroll way more than I should need to?

* In addition to the narrow column, the entries IN the column take up too much space, the UI could be arranged to be much more efficient.

* Since search results are within a channel, don't put the channel name after each entry, there's no point.

* Might be nice to have the time offset visible to the left of the text excerpt. I can see it on mouseover, but still. Might be nice to see.

* Can the videos be made to play inline, without redirecting to youtube, then navigating back, and redoing the search?

* Perhaps, after searching for a result, we could see a graph at the top showing all the videos containing that term over time, and easily click on it to go directly there.

Very cool! Well done!

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!

Cool! Thank you!

Here are some example use-cases that I included in another comment, in case any of them are relevant to you:

1. You want to find all videos within a YouTube channel that mention your brand, your product, or the topics you care about.

2. You remember watching a video where a certain topic was discussed, and now you're trying to remember which video it was to rewatch it.

3. You run your own YouTube channel and want to quickly find the exact moments in your videos where you cover certain topics, so you can link others to that content.

Maybe #2 happens occasionally? If so, maybe you can bookmark VideoMentions Search for just such an occasion :)

In any event, thanks for checking out my project, and for the kind words!

Site's definitely bookmarked in my toolbox for sure! I imagine #2 will be my primary use case personally -- If not for me, to answer "Does anyone know the video where.."

e: thinking about it I know a few people who pull highlights out of their older content (sort of #3). Shared with them :)

They loved it if you see any stats along the line of Scotland/UK + Discord referral haha

Are the video transcripts searchable?

Yes, this is how VideoMentions Search works. It scrapes the video page markup and pulls out the "baseUrl" for the English caption track. It converts that XML caption track into JSON, then searches it for keyword matches. Is that what you're asking about?

If you want to search within the transcript of a single video, you can accomplish that with these steps: https://kb.swtc.edu/page.php?id=90230

Ah got it. I thought there would be some API where the transcripts could be searched across videos. Maybe that requires way to many resources for Google to index

Yeah, Google is of course the king of search, so they could certainly decide to revamp YouTube search to include spoken word/transcription matches. They have all the data required to make that happen. That would make VideoMentions Search irrelevant– and I'd be okay with that!

In the meantime, I think this is a useful tool for quickly locating videos based on spoken words.

Thanks for checking out my project!