This looks super cool! There's a need for tools to make the millions of videos on the web actually useful for people like me who would much rather skim search and read than watch. Bravo to you for making a stab at it!
I'm guessing you need a specific channel as a way of getting a list of videos, then pulling the captioning, then searching? (That's the only reason I could think of for the channel restriction, which unfortunately removes 90% of the utility)
Hey @loxias! Yes, you're exactly right - VideoMentions scrapes the video page markup and pulls out the "baseUrl" for the English caption track. It converts that XML caption track into JSON, then searches it for keyword matches.
YouTube doesn't provide a way to search all of YouTube based on spoken words, unfortunately. Still, I think this is a useful tool for quickly locating spoken word matches within a certain channel.
Some Hacker News commenters have suggested that I could auto-import all the channels the user is subscribed to, or get videos from their watch history, which are interesting ideas. For this first iteration, I kept things simple with a single "Channel URL" input.
Thanks for checking out my project, and for your feedback!
> Still, I think this is a useful tool for quickly locating spoken word matches within a certain channel.
Absolutely, and I agree, however,.... it necessitates that the user use or understand "channels". When I went to your site my first thought was "what the hell's a channel?" ;-)
But yeah, for whatever percentage of youtube users use channels, I see this having a lot of use. My totally unsolicited advice is that you'll have to find some way to remove the channel requirement. Perhaps suggesting channels based on the search terms. (I've seen your other comments about adding features to a paid version)
I haven't yet managed to get VideoMentions to actually work, but that's fine, I assume you're getting hugged to death. :D Shipping anything is hard, and congrats for that.
Yeah, maybe I'll consider having two versions of search - one version for paid customers that allows you to search for YouTube channels by name/keyword and allows you to search across all the channels you're subscribed to or across all the videos in your watch history, and a second version that's free and similar to the current iteration.
VideoMentions Search should work just fine for you - there is no server and no database behind it. When searches are performed, serverless functions are called that source data from YouTube, then return a response to the client. So it should scale just fine.
(firstly, that search works fine and returns very quickly! Now that I know it's client side, I've been able to do a few searches of my own to see how it works. It works well! The ones I did earlier were looking at a large channel "PBS Newshour" for various news topics over "All time")
(secondly, DO consider putting your email address on your HN profile!)
Whoa! Client side!?! Far out man, far out. To be honest, I was a little unimpressed before -- but didn't feel like "your idea is _brilliant_, but implementation leaves a lot to be desired. makes me want to try my hand at writing my own." would be a constructive comment. ;-)
But, knowing this is all done client side?? I tip my hat, that's *clever*! The whole site could be a static and local set of files? I had no idea things like this could even be done without a server or other real program to do the work. (though now that I think about it, I have an idea how, duh. YouTube exposes a JS API I bet, so you can have the client call it each time, do the searching work, &c.)
That avoids scalability issues and probably legal ones as well! What a game changer...
Was there an existing framework used for building client side web apps like this, or did you roll your own?
While I've got you, and I admit that graphical UIs are ... an area where my opinion should carry no weight (I'm the sort who.. doesn't use icons, and when writing personal tools, the "user interface" is positional parameters to a command line program ;-)), here are some suggestions:
* The UI, while clean and unbusy (yay!!), feels BLOATED with white space. Why do the results occupy this tiny narrow column, forcing me to scroll way more than I should need to?
* In addition to the narrow column, the entries IN the column take up too much space, the UI could be arranged to be much more efficient.
* Since search results are within a channel, don't put the channel name after each entry, there's no point.
* Might be nice to have the time offset visible to the left of the text excerpt. I can see it on mouseover, but still. Might be nice to see.
* Can the videos be made to play inline, without redirecting to youtube, then navigating back, and redoing the search?
* Perhaps, after searching for a result, we could see a graph at the top showing all the videos containing that term over time, and easily click on it to go directly there.
I'm guessing you need a specific channel as a way of getting a list of videos, then pulling the captioning, then searching? (That's the only reason I could think of for the channel restriction, which unfortunately removes 90% of the utility)