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

dev1ycan

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?

atum47

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.

wincy

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)

VenezuelaFree

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

ddtaylor

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.

loveparade

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

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.

dbbk

It works perfectly fine.

throw7

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.

SilverElfin

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

perching_aix

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

cj00

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

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

storus

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

phyzix5761

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

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.

jdprgm

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

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

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

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.