Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters

https://playlists.at/youtube/search/

by nevernothing • 4 months ago

325 204 4 months ago

playlists.at

dev1ycan• 4 months ago

This is just adding the hidden filters such as

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?

throw_m239339• 4 months ago

As long I doesn't shove "shorts" or "other people watched" in the result list, it's an improvement. Sometimes the results are so egregious and completely unrelated to the search terms that I feel like youtube wants to piss me off on purpose. I don't want to be searching some quantum physics video and get videos of some barely clothed women in Miami, I fail to see how it is related...

tremarley• 4 months ago

Enshittification is the reason

awesome_dude• 4 months ago

I think that it's a fair title - it takes the "hidden" search terms and brings them to the surface for users.

The (default) YouTube search is barely useful

They have made a search WITH the advanced features available

Everything as advertised (IMO)

bryanhogan• 4 months ago

One of the problems with YouTube seach is that they also stop showing you what you searched for after a couple of videos, instead you get the same crap you find on the homepage, which is bewildering.

bilegeek• 4 months ago

Can't remember where I got them, but there's some uBO rules that really help on that front:

  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/)

Also got some other rules from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44332976

This all shouldn't be necessary, but alas...

prophesi5• 4 months ago

One of the first things I do on a new device is install an extension to expose these hidden filters, and to hide recommended videos + redirect the homepage to the subscriptions tab.

cure_42• 4 months ago

What extension exposes the hidden filters???

nevernothing4• 4 months ago

You're basically right, it's just a UI for the old search filters, at least for the ones that still work today.

atum472• 4 months ago

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.

jeffbee2• 4 months ago

I know it's really really loud in your echo chamber but short form videos are extremely popular.

mech422• 4 months ago

He didn't say they weren't ? He said youtube keeps recommending 'cringe' shorts no-one wants to see. I can sympathize with him - I have the youtube recommends the same 4 videos over and over again in multiple categories issue, and the 'lots of shorts I don't care about issue'. Though, shorts at least get refreshed/rotated more often then the stupid suggestions.

owlboy3• 4 months ago

I desperately want someone to interview someone at YouTube and directly ask about this bullshit and get them to say it’s all in the name of increasing watch time at all costs.

atum472• 4 months ago

https://anonmp4.help/v/SCBI4QBrglJIZix

See if you can count how many times the video "where do video games come from" appears in my front page.

wincy• 4 months ago

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)

msephton3• 4 months ago

Just put the term in quotes "sanic the hedgeheg" ignore the suggestions and press enter to see the real results.

thfuran• 4 months ago

Google no longer cares much about quotes. Sometimes it’ll take them seriously and sometimes not.

QuantumNomad_2• 4 months ago

I was curious after reading your comment and searched for sanic meme tshirt in the YouTube app. One result looked highly relevant, posted 4 days ago. It was a short, not a normal video mind you. Titled Official “Sanic” merchandise and having a picture of sanic and some dude’s face. Most of the rest of the results were from different dates, several ranging to years ago. But a lot of those other ones seemed to be about meme sanic as well at least.

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

john01dav• 4 months ago

I just put this into YouTube search and got results that contraindicate your claim¹:

"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.

AlBugdy3• 4 months ago

It was a short, not a normal video mind you.

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.

byte_0• 4 months ago

This is exactly the type of criteria that WhatsApp search struggles with. It basically assumes the user does not know how to type.

kristopolous• 4 months ago

if there's no way to successfully attest competency then you are allocating your time poorly.

kotaKat• 4 months ago

Apparently To Catch a Predator ("TCAP") makes YouTube think I've got a Spanish eating disorder and shoves a full screen "you're not alone" screen at you to call some eating disorder helpline.

VenezuelaFree• 4 months ago

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 frustrating

It got so bad that even searching the full tittle of the video doesnt show you that video haha

gsky• 4 months ago

on top of that it pushes worst creators (who are the biggest thanks to yt) content.

tyrust3• 4 months ago

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 frustrating

Brother, you are the one choosing the videos.

wswope2• 4 months ago

Exactly the sort of user hostility I’d expect from a google employee. Shameful.

Maybe if practical tools such as like-ratios were in place users could sort good content from bad.

jijji• 4 months ago

The search filters and the user interface in general on YouTube is garbage. you guys need to go back to the drawing board. it really is almost impossible to find a video, you have to sort through hundreds of AI slop clickbait videos in order to get to the one that you're actually interested in finding.

insin2• 4 months ago

It's gone massively downhill recently, noticeably so since the ability to sort by upload date was removed from the UI (and then very quickly removed from the API too). That was the final brick that prevented it from being literally unusable, now it's scroll and hope (and give up).

Chaosvex• 4 months ago

Nah, YouTube is absolutely shoving slop at users. They recently removed some of the search filters such as sorting by date, just to make it a little bit harder to find anything.

adito• 4 months ago

What got me really mad is searching your own history. There's this "search watch history" on the https://www.youtube.com/feed/history

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.

kalleboo• 4 months ago

Google.com is a lot better at searching YouTube than YouTube is at searching YouTube

hexage18142• 4 months ago

I remember watching video that contains certain word in the title

You could use youtube-dl to download the all automatic subtitles those videos and then search.

RobotToaster• 4 months ago

I seem to remember at one point there was a bug (or "bug") where watches wouldn't be tracked if you used an adblocker.

eager_learner2• 4 months ago

Amazon is the same now. I can't find books on it that I know for sure exist on it. It always pushes something else first.

somat• 4 months ago

Youtube search is also weird in that it has a hard time finding something directly but will find it and put it it in the suggested videos feed after you have given up. 4 or 5 videos later. (shrugs) hell if I know.

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.

mister_mort2• 4 months ago

Perhaps this is due to Youtube's alternate titles or A/B/C testing scheme feature?

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?

KellyCriterion2• 4 months ago

I suspect YT-Search is broken by intention

There is no way that this billion company isnt/cant be able to build a working search for its video titles&texts.

Electricniko• 4 months ago

And good luck if the video you're looking for was related to something featured in a news report. No, youtube, I am not searching for 100 different local TV news stories about a viral video, when I type in the title of that viral video.

maxxmod2• 4 months ago

It doesn’t solve all the issues you mention, but YouTube Search Fixer [1] [2] is a browser extension that at least lets you remove irrelevant results, Shorts, live streams, and more from search. It makes results a bit more usable.

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...

el_io• 4 months ago

YouTube search filter is godsend.

Alifatisk2• 4 months ago

Wish I knew about this extension earlier.

mosquitobiten2• 4 months ago

Just read the description and OMG soo much crap, thank you so much for this. I guess when I filter these dopamine leeches in my mind I kind of lump them together

GeoSys• 4 months ago

They want to push down you throat whatever their algo decides.

What sort of API do you use to search?

t0bia_s• 4 months ago

https://freetubeapp.io/

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...

carlosjobim2• 4 months ago

FreeTube has been extremely slow with loading videos for me. Otherwise it's a killer app and I would use it if it was possible to connect my premium account login to it.

atoav• 4 months ago

Surely they just want to avoid straining their database so they put some "performance hacks" into their database instructions that they Ab/B-tested to "work" for 90 percent of people or something.

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.

bonoboTP• 4 months ago

Nowadays if I want to see videos on a certain topic (not searching for a specific video), I usually ask an AI assistant. It uses web search with multiple related phrases and then picks the relevant ones out. I find this to be very effective right now, but of course in the future they could enshittify these assistants too.

pbasista• 4 months ago

forced to watch ... 3 ads

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.

01jonny012• 4 months ago

Try skipvids search it removes all the noise, including shorts and ai slop

infecto• 4 months ago

Search and recommendations is terrible. It’s a classic example of what’s wrong at Google.

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.

ddtaylor3• 4 months ago

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.

atomicfiredoll• 4 months ago

Things like FreeTube and NewPipe let you keep a subscription list, even if you watch the videos elsewhere.

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.)

loveparade2• 4 months ago

You could manage your subscriptions in an RSS reader, that's what I used to do. Each channel has multiple RSS feeds associated with it for different types of videos (live, vod, etc).

jeffbee2• 4 months ago

That's ... exactly what the subscriptions feed does right now?

ddtaylor3• 4 months ago

The subscriptions page was changed about a month ago. It now shows the videos in the top as "Relevant", which includes a list of videos from the ~12 days that are being suggested to you. After that is a real list of chronologically ordered videos, but videos are not listed twice. This means if the video appears in the first list (as "relevant") then it will not be shown in the second list.

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/subscriptions

deadbeef7f• 4 months ago

My subscription feed now has a row of 3 videos labeled "priority", then a row of 3 videos labeled "latest", then a row of "Shorts," then it appears to continue on with the "latest" but there's no label.

This 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.

try-working• 4 months ago

you can use lurkkit.com to build your own chronological youtube feed with only your subscriptions

insin2• 4 months ago

This is also the way I use YouTube and is the main thing I made Control Panel for YouTube [1] for (well, that plus globally hiding Shorts and removing all the unwanted recommendations everywhere) - my Subscriptions page acts like an inbox of unwatched videos and everything else is hidden (most recently: the new "Most relevant" section and "Collaborations" videos with channels I'm not subscribed to).

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.

[1] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube

porjo• 4 months ago

I use https://porjo.github.io/freshtube/ almost daily. It requires a Google API key but only have to set it once.

01jonny012• 4 months ago

Skipvids.com recreates the old youtube subscription page experience pretty well.

a962• 4 months ago

Well, it's a semi nuclear one, but https://github.com/woefe/ytcc

nonethewiser5• 4 months ago

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.

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.

ddtaylor3• 4 months ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47656418

Its still like this. Sadly mobile is the only place I get a "real" subscriptions page, probably because I'm using ReVanced.

loveparade2• 4 months ago

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.

owlboy3• 4 months ago

They see those hovers as attention. And they likely calculate how long you linger. The lingering tells them a lot when you are infinite scrolling on other platforms.

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.)

macintux• 4 months ago

I’m suddenly grateful that I use my iPad, so they can’t use that signal on me.

nonethewiser5• 4 months ago

Why does opening the youtube app sometimes just go straight into a short?

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.

6thbit2• 4 months ago

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.

gbnwl• 4 months ago

You can search videos within a channel, go to the channel page and look for the magnifying glass all the way at the end of the nav bar that has

Well at least in browser its there, I can't find it on mobile for whatever reason.

6thbit2• 4 months ago

you're right! i was only looking at the mobile version. Sucks it's not there cause I typically don't have my pc around when infront of the TV and wanna search something.

eieio• 4 months ago

I made a little TUI last month for searching within a channel! It supports before: / after:, fuzzy/exact/regex matching, lets you order by upload date/views/duration, lets you search over just a video's titles or descriptions, etc: https://github.com/nolenroyalty/yt-browse

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).

userbinator• 4 months ago

It’s peak irony a company owned by the search overlord.

...whose search engine has itself become noticeably less of a search engine and more of a recommendation/sheeple-herding engine over time.

nothercastle• 4 months ago

Google of today would absolutely get steamrolled by any of the search engines it used to compete against. Now granted the web of today is mostly a toxic waste pile vs more of a cluttered basement back then.

KomoD2• 4 months ago

I still can’t believe they don’t let you search videos within a channel for example.

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

extraduder_ire• 4 months ago

I've had ctrl+f work for searching within the transcript on the page recently. I assumed it wouldn't due to lazy loading, but was surprised because the video I tried it on was quite long.

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.

dbbk• 4 months ago

It works perfectly fine.

throw73• 4 months ago

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.

dugite-code• 4 months ago

Yes any RSS reader works for this task.

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.

throw73• 4 months ago

ok thanks!, i never knew there was an rss feed for each channel/users... that does open up solutions.

Fr0styMatt882• 4 months ago

This is great!

maxxmod2• 4 months ago

Not exactly what you’re looking for, but Pocket Tube [1] [2] is a browser extension that lets you organize your subscriptions into custom groups. You can then browse non-algorithmic feeds showing the latest uploads from each group, which makes things much easier to manage and filter.

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...

throw73• 4 months ago

interesting. looking forward to the release.

Fr0styMatt882• 4 months ago

EDIT: Sorry I realised you were asking more about categorisation and not downloading.

——

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.

https://www.tubearchivist.com/

https://github.com/alexta69/metube

efilife• 4 months ago

FreeTube

SilverElfin• 4 months ago

Really wish there was an alternative. Especially to the manipulation of it all by YouTube (demonetization and other tactics).

perching_aix• 4 months ago

Author must clearly never use porn sites like xvideos or PornHub, if they think YouTube's search is what "barely works".

cj00• 4 months ago

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.

owlboy3• 4 months ago

Do you automate your takeout so the DB is relatively fresh?

RRRA• 4 months ago

Yeah the only reason I still use YouTube is because μBlock Origin still works great.

storus2• 4 months ago

Cable TV->enshittification->YouTube to the rescue->enshittification->???

phyzix5761• 4 months ago

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.

moralestapia• 4 months ago

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.

storus2• 4 months ago

I am forced to use Yandex just to find stuff Google or DDG never shows anymore.

carefree-bob2• 4 months ago

Interesting. Do you have some examples?

Esn0242• 4 months ago

I often find that using Google Search (the Video tab, with "site:youtube.com") allows me to find videos that don't show up in the YouTube search... or sometimes vice versa!

jdprgm• 4 months ago

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.

BoppreH• 4 months ago

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.

zmmmmm• 4 months ago

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.

jmyeet• 4 months ago

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.

tcherasaro3• 4 months ago

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.

tredre32• 4 months ago

Your idea doesn't explain why:

- 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

tartoran• 4 months ago

-YouTube search returns popular completely unrelated content (mostly brainrot) which is clearly feeding to users to watch in case they forgot they were searching for something else

-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

tcherasaro3• 4 months ago

I've certainly experienced both of these and a lot of the other occurrences people are describing here, but here's what I think is going on in these 2 cases and why. This is based on my own observations actually trying to get videos ranked in search.

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.

dns_snek4• 4 months ago

You have that causal relationship flipped around. Content is being optimized for clickbait engagement because that's the only way to survive, many creators have talked about this.

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.

tcherasaro3• 4 months ago

Fair points. I think my point about people targeting search overlaps actually.

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.

a962• 4 months ago

That also doesn't explain why it was better and why it's been getting worse all the time. Also, just a simple text search in the titles would be much better, let alone all the text data that YT has on the videos. Even with keyword spam, that seems like a very simple task to get close to right. Once upon a time it might have even been there.

swrly• 4 months ago

I agree, YouTube search is completely useless when we really need it. Especially with fizzy search!

dawnerd• 4 months ago

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.

danpalmer2• 4 months ago

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?

Barrin92• 4 months ago

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

danpalmer2• 4 months ago

I haven't noticed this because in all of the above examples the first result is the one I want, almost without exception. In a scenario where the top result or two is correct, showing other stuff after result 3 doesn't sound that bad.

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.

carefree-bob2• 4 months ago

It works pretty well for me, but my searches are mostly automotive youtube or some tech stuff.

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.

rhdunn2• 4 months ago

That search (e.g. `ford fiesta water pump`) is consistent for me as well, except for an "explore more" section in the middle of the results.

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.

KevinMS• 4 months ago

I'm a heavy YT user and I don't have a problem either. I'm not sure what everybody is complaining about. Maybe its because I don't search on super specific things because I'm just looking for a larger topic, and I'm not sure if its actually returning all the best results because I don't know what it has to give me.

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.

rhdunn2• 4 months ago

Examples:

- `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.

nonethewiser5• 4 months ago

I just did the first one (`dune book review`) and the results were good. Like 12 relevant results, 5 shorts in one row (also relevant), followed by many more relevant results.

stuffoverflow• 4 months ago

For me the problem is usually finding older videos. Youtube's search heavily favors newer videos to the point of completely hiding older ones even if using the exact video title. They've also removed the possibility of sorting results by date somewhere within last 6 months.

gall• 4 months ago

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.

usernamed7• 4 months ago

I confirmed searching for "Iran" with a before set ends up showing me all recent results. BUT if i use this search form to generate the query (and not the youtube search bar) it works.

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...

aaa_aaa• 4 months ago

Downfall of youtube is one word: shorts.

rvnx• 4 months ago

The worst offender is Apple Music search. Sad because the service is great

ankitsanghi• 4 months ago

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.

Esn0242• 4 months ago

Nice work! Does this use the YouTube data API behind the scenes? https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/search/list

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.

Vachyas3• 4 months ago

I'd like to second that I wish a lot of those existed. For 1), 60fps is another good one.

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?

nevernothing4• 4 months ago

Yes, there was a filter for the last hour, I think they got rid of it this year.

nevernothing4• 4 months ago

The search form does not use the YouTube Data API. It's essentially a link generator. Unfortunately YouTube doesn't offer filters for point 1–4.

hexage18142• 4 months ago

You should add this option to filter shorts: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&sp=CAI%253D

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.

nevernothing4• 4 months ago

Thanks for the tip, the Shorts filter is now on by default.

micw• 4 months ago

Hey great. Need the same for amazon ^^

oyebenny• 4 months ago

Colour me surpised.

gbro3n2• 4 months ago

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!

Dban1• 4 months ago

Hostile engineering

gbro3n2• 4 months ago

Maybe, I'm not clear what the goal is though.

jfoster• 4 months ago

Really nice. Bookmarked it. Thank you for making it!

diceduckmonk• 4 months ago

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.

WhyIsItAlwaysHN• 4 months ago

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.

WASDx• 4 months ago

Similar site with same features: https://xn--1-zfa.com/

moropex• 4 months ago

been doing site:youtube.com on google for years because youtube search is that bad. the google video option here is a nice touch

Vachyas3• 4 months ago

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.

AlBugdy3• 4 months ago

I wish I could select "between 2.5 and 6 minutes". That search can translate to 2 queries to YouTube (<4 and 4-20), then the results can be combined and pruned to keep only those between 2.5 and 6. To get enough videos if there aren't enough after pruning, we could access the 2nd, 3rd and so on pages from the results. But I doubt YouTube will like 6 searches in a row.

Vachyas3• 4 months ago

Yea and I'm doubtful we'll see a service willing to do their own post-processing per-query while also being at the whim of Youtube's API (official or not).

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).

1e1a• 4 months ago

I looked into youtube's search filters recently, and the length range option is stored as an enum (stored as base64-encoded protobuf in the sp query parameter), so it doesn't look like it's possible to set to specific values.

Duplicake• 4 months ago

All this does it generate a search term from what you put in which you can do pretty easily yourself

Alifatisk2• 4 months ago

I feel like we have reached a point where Youtube can just remove the search fields and let their algorithms do its thing.

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.

loloquwowndueo• 4 months ago

I am stuck there, because the creators are there.

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.

etothet• 4 months ago

Its actually kind of fascinating how a huge enterprise like Youtube can ruin a feature to the point that its actually useless.

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.

nonethewiser5• 4 months ago

I feel like we have reached a point where Youtube can just remove the search fields and let their algorithms do its thing.
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.

xtiansimon• 4 months ago

Ooh. I despise how YouTube removes videos from my saved videos list, “Unavailable videos were removed”. YouTube is crap.

carlosjobim2• 4 months ago

Would it be possible to toggle the search to exclude all videos with emojis in their title?

I've noticed that every YouTube video containing one or more emojis in their title are AI generated spam.

jjallen• 4 months ago

I’ve never been annoyed with YouTube search. Product is great as far as I’m concerned. Love YouTube all around.

joserohan• 4 months ago

Looks neat!

phendrenad2• 4 months ago

I've just stopped using YouTube entirely. I'll watch the odd video that gets linked somewhere else, but I actively avoid going there. And this is as someone who used to pay for YouTube Premium. The site just doesn't value my time, and the company seems to think that I'll just accept watching whatever the algorithms decides I should watch. No thanks.

nonethewiser5• 4 months ago

This is the "normal science" of software engineering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science

loloktryagain• 4 months ago

It literally just parses it into a regular YouTube search, this is vaporware trash

fighting_anakin• 4 months ago

Thank god. I can't believe how horrible youtube's search functionality has gotten. I wonder if it's a function of scale or due to the new generation not engaging with old videos.

KellyCriterion2• 4 months ago

Can it sort by "upload date" which was removed by YT some weeks ago?

sorkhabi• 4 months ago

I tested your app. It works well and is super fast. Well done.

spacec0wb0y• 4 months ago

That's pretty useful. On the form, the "Date before" and "Date after" field naming is confusing. I'd expect the earlier date to display first and be called "from" rather than "Date after". You could probably restrict the date fields too so users can't pick dates in the future

japaco• 3 months ago

Now this is a game changer for YouTube. I admit I'm still a YT platform junkie, but it's the only platform I scroll, so I give myself a little latitude. Nice job!

Show HN: I made a YouTube search form with advanced filters

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