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

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

64•nevernothing•2h ago

Comments

dev1ycan•1h 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•1h 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•1h ago

Enshittification is the reason

awesome_dude•1h 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•1h 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•11m 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...

prophesi•1h 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•1h ago

What extension exposes the hidden filters???

prophesi•50m ago

You could probably vibe-code it if it doesn't exist. You're literally just adding extra parameters to the search request. Hard part is creating the interface for it. Saw more options looking for Firefox extensions than Chrome for this, though that might be expected.

lucb1e•46m ago

> One of the first things I do on a new device is install an extension to ...

< [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)

prophesi•39m ago

> You're literally just adding extra parameters to the search request

> 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?

nevernothing•1h ago

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

atum47•1h 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.

jeffbee•15m ago

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

wincy•56m 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)

msephton•35m ago

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

thfuran•31m ago

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

QuantumNomad_•32m 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

VenezuelaFree•44m 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•23m ago

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

storus•9m ago

I recently decided to download a bunch of playlists using Stacher and host them on a local JellyFin instance, e.g. Stanford lectures for a bunch of classes like CS25 or CS326 I wanted to review. Whenever I find a link to an interesting YouTube video, I just download that way and put it on the server to watch later (have a single cmd line for that).

ddtaylor•40m 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•32m 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.)

loveparade•25m 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).

jeffbee•20m ago

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

try-working•11m ago

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

loveparade•36m 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.

6thbit•30m 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•20m 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.

eieio•14m 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•14m 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.

KomoD•5m 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

dbbk•28m ago

It works perfectly fine.

throw7•26m 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•11m 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.

SilverElfin•26m ago

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

perching_aix•11m ago

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

cj00•10m 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.

RRRA•10m ago

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

storus•7m ago

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

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