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Comment by truly | Hacker News Reader

Nice! Is it possible to do it without fixing the channel?

No, they'd have to index all youtube videos then.

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

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!

Perhaps you could have channel owners register their channel if they want to be indexed. That would be super useful.

Hey @truly- this is a good thought, but I think it would be impossible to get buy-in from enough channels to make it useful. I could update the UI to support searching across multiple channels at once, though, or pull the channels from the user’s subscriptions or watches videos list. I’ll see if there’s enough demand for those features, then consider adding them.

Thanks for checking out my project!

This field was a blocker for me as well. If the channel field was an async select that helped autocomplete lookup channel urls by channel name, this would be way more convenient.

My use case would be for ham radio. Lots of ham radio YouTubers film their QSOs (conversations) and mention the callsigns that they make contact with. I want to find the channels that mention my callsign and I'm sure lots of other hams would want to know. Anywho cool project. GL 73

I agree! This is how the paid VideoMentions.com service works- users can search for channels by name, without the need to paste in URLs. This 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!

I'm assuming it's using the API to download captions and scanning them, which is why it'd need the Channel. It would be so hard to know where to begin without it!

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

Yep, you're exactly right. The tool works by getting the channel's videos, then fetching the voice-to-text transcripts for them, then searching within the spoken words (along with the title and description) for any keyword matches. So there isn't a feasible way to do that across all of YouTube.

I like your idea of searching the logged-in user's history! That could be handy. Another thing I've thought about is auto-importing all the channels they're subscribed to so they can search within those.

For the first version of VideoMentions Search, I kept things simple with a single "Channel URL" input field, but using their history/subscriptions is totally doable. I'll see if there's enough demand for that.

In any event, I still think that this simple first version has utility. I like being able to quickly pinpoint all the moments when a certain topic was mentioned across all of a channel's videos.

Thanks so much for taking a look, and for your feedback!

Do you keep the transcripts around on the server? It shouldn't matter much in terms of storage unless the site becomes crazy popular, so you could offer a "best effort search" or something along the lines, that just searches everything you got so far, so the site would get better and better over time.

YouTube kills your API key if you do this and make the data available (eg via API).

You're allowed to cache responses for a bit but not store them long term. "How would they know", etc of course, but if you're distributing the data they'll figure it out. Some smart cookies over there at Google.

My small website managed to get on their radar and I didn't even post it to HN!

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