Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters
playlists.at
playlists.at
It got so bad that even searching the full tittle of the video doesnt show you that video haha
Brother, you are the one choosing the videos.
Maybe if practical tools such as like-ratios were in place users could sort good content from bad.
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.
I have about as much say in YouTube as you do. In the org tree, the lowest common ancestor between me and YouTube is Sundar.
My original comment was a joke about the fact that someone felt as if they were "forced" to watch something. It was more of a comment on consumer attitude than YouTube itself. I'm sorry YT isn't working well for y'all. That said, expecting some grunt employee like me to feel personally responsible (or even "ashamed"??) is ridiculous.
The point of a company is what it does: The money in your paycheck comes from anti-competitive behavior, denying accountability and customer support to your users, and yes, even the enshittification of Youtube.
Deny it all you want, but you have every opportunity to walk away and do something better for society with your life if you so choose.
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.
use the term, let trademark expire
You could use youtube-dl to download the all automatic subtitles those videos and then search.
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.
YT videos have a canonical title, but can have other one assigned randomly (as well as alternate thumbnails). If you're in the B group you might have gotten the B title, but search might only look through canonical titles?
There is no way that this billion company isnt/cant be able to build a working search for its video titles&texts.
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...
What sort of API do you use to search?
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...
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.
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.
I used to love watching recommended videos at the end of a video. They were always focused on some extension of the current video watched. Now it’s slop trying to peddle stuff I don’t watch or YouTube shorts. Same with search. It is so terrible, you get maybe 2-4 relevant results and then it again weights all the YouTube slop.
"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.
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.
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.")
Like "cannot" vs "can not": One form may be more-correct, but both are very readable.
Either way, it's easy enough to blame spell check on our personal pocket supercomputers for these things.
(Every year or two, Google Keyboard on Android makes it its purpose to screw up "its" vs "it's". You type it the right way, you see it on the screen as being correct, and then it changes it to the wrong form. This happens 100% of the time and then the problem disappears in a few weeks.
I'd give Google a break, but they don't deserve one.
I also blame them single-handedly for the variations in spellings of brake-vs-break on the longer timeline: Sometimes, people get it right and nobody notices. Oftentimes, it's all backwards. The oscillation suggests that it is an auto-derp problem more than it is a cognitive one.)
I use a keyboard (Thumb-Key to be precise) without autocorrect, though it doesn't stop me from making typing mistakes.
I (usually!) want to find documents that include the words that I'm searching for, not an endless stream of links that some particularly-useless bot thinks I might want instead.
(And when that search returns no results, then that is also a useful data point for me.)
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
> "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.
If anyone doesn't know, you can change shorts/<ID> with watch?v=<ID> in the URL and it gives you the same UI as for other videos, including the controls (the time line). Not sure why YouTube doesn't have controls for shorts. I've seen some Facebook videos not having controls, either, when I've been sent a link. I imagine it's the same for Instagram and TikTok.
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 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 mean, i know why it does that. Engagement. But I mean what governs it? Just a percent chance? If you havent watched any shorts in a while?
Definitely another example of the shit UI/UX you speak of.
The last time I tried YTs search field was when I was trying to find an older video in my history. Nothing, even if I typed down the exact keywords. Nothing. Luckily, I found it through myactivity.google.com.
Its actually kind of fascinating how a huge enterprise like Youtube can ruin a feature to the point that its actually useless.
What they are good at is pushing irrelevant content everywhere, if I scroll to the bottom of my playlist, there is a suggestions feed. If I search something, after a couple of results, it turns into a suggestion feed. Even my subscribers feed is now a recommendations system at the top instead of just displaying in chronological order.
If it wasn’t for their dominance in the market, I would have left long time ago. But I am stuck there, because the creators are there.
uBlock and Sponsorblock is a bless.
I am curious if there is alternative frontends to youtube that also allows me to sign in with my Googlw account and access all my playlist, likes, watch later etc.
Don’t make this mistake. You are not “stuck” - you’re making a choice. You can also choose to seek other materials elsewhere to stay entertained.
For the people in charge of engagement at YouTube, making search useless is a feature. If most people don’t get value from search then they’ll resign and be forced into following the algorithm, which is how Google wants you to consume YouTube.
Similar reason why streaming providers keep making it more difficult to find your previously watched list.
> The last time I tried YTs search field was when I was trying to find an older video in my history. Nothing, even if I typed down the exact keywords. Nothing. Luckily, I found it through myactivity.google.com.
I have had a similar experience but it seems ridiculous to propose removing the search. It's not like its returning random results. It does generally work, even with the major failure points you describe.
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.
Ultimately, I would like these features to come to Youtube itself since there's a lot of nice features built into it that would be hard for a third-party to replicate without permission (such as playing videos inline on hover, with captions).
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 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- `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.
See if you can count how many times the video "where do video games come from" appears in my front page.
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.
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.
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...
——
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.
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.)
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:
yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser chrome --flat-playlist https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptionsThis 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.
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.
What is your subscription page now?
I just checked mine and its just an ordered list of videos from channels I subscribe to ordered by most recent.
Its still like this. Sadly mobile is the only place I get a "real" subscriptions page, probably because I'm using ReVanced.
Or filter out music playlist from video ones.
Or search within transcripts.
It’s peak irony a company owned by the search overlord.
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.
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).
...whose search engine has itself become noticeably less of a search engine and more of a recommendation/sheeple-herding engine over time.
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
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.
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
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.
via the search form: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+%22iran%22+bef...
via the YT search: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+%22iran%22+bef...
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.
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?
I've noticed that every YouTube video containing one or more emojis in their title are AI generated spam.
If you have thousands of resources in GCP, for example, the search is not super helpful.
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.
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?
The (default) YouTube search is barely useful
They have made a search WITH the advanced features available
Everything as advertised (IMO)
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/)
This all shouldn't be necessary, but alas...
< [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)
> 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?
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 you heard "vibe-code" and immediately went out of your way to act obtuse, even though I was using it as an example of how simple it is to show these "hidden" filters.
Yes, I find the suggestion to waste a bunch of energy creating a mediocre extension that might actually work, when there is apparently an existing one that you are already happy with, a bit silly. But that wasn't the contradiction I was pointing out
These changes baffle me. It's not even enshittification because I cannot see any benefit to YouTube at all.
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.
- 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 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
Immediately after publishing a search optimized video the main way I measure if I was successful with the technical part of optimization (Title, description, transcript, Text Overlay, keyword density) is to search the exact title to see if my video appears. Immediately after publishing like within minutes, it usually does appear within the first five to ten results.
After the youtube "testing period" if the CTR and AVD (retention) are good, then the views increase from there as the video starts to rank and get tested for more related keywords. And the video certainly continues to rank for the exact title.
If click through and retention are bad in the testing period then the video fails to rank and the video seems to disappear or get pushed way down when searching exact title.
So I believe CTR and AVD maybe factors in YouTube SEO.
After 3-5 results I have noticed that there seems be a segment of long form videos and then shorts actually targeting that casual browse traffic in a search result page! The long form results in those positions are usually weak on technical optimization, only tangentially related or fluffy in terms of delivering on the user's search intent, but from larger channels that are heavily edited, produced and optimized for click through and viewer retention. The kind of hostile user experience that tries to keep people watching for longer with retention editing and by teasing or hyping good info when the user really just needs answers but are easily enticed by better packaging when the first 3 results didn't meet their intent.
I notice the same videos again and again in those positions for a wide range of primary keywords and even the seed keyword, and they get tons of search traffic even though they aren't answering user intent because youtube has realized these videos are effective at converting a laser-focused search user looking for specific information into a casual viewer who is happy to be entertained for a longer period of time when they couldn't find the information they were really looking for.
Let's face it, if the first few results didn't deliver, weren't optimized; then from YouTube's perspective, the user is browsing at that point and it's going to do it's best to retain them.
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.
Creators think they can't survive on 2k views, especially since that's not guaranteed and YouTube isn't providing actual search results all the way down the SERP providing even less opportunity to rank so then they go after more views with clickbait and engagement across broader topics that aren't going to meet a users search intent and provide specific content. In a lot of niches that might be true.
Now if they could knew they could consistently rank in search and that multiple videos producing 2k views per month, month after month and compound after time then they might have more interest in optimizing those videos more.
Im a big fan of Rossmann, and wouldn't you know I found that video you are talking about on YouTube search of all places by searching "louis rossmann creating website with gemini"
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check that out.
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.
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.