Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
I love that a third party is stepping up here, but it's incomprehensible to me that Google doesn't do this themselves. They're a search company, and they own YouTube. The YouTube data — including the subtitle files — is already sitting there <i>on</i> their servers; they don't have to scrape it, they just have to index it. What are they even doing?<p>Fun thing to try: do a Google search with "site:youtube.com" in it. You get basically nothing, no matter what keywords you use. It seems that Google actually entirely ignores/excludes YouTube from their regular HTML indexing, and instead <i>only</i> relies on the YouTube backend to actively push content <i>into</i> (a special, separate part of) the search index. Which gets you "results from YouTube" and "video search" — but doesn't get you the ability to search youtube videos pages <i>qua</i> web pages. (Consider: you can find a post in a Reddit comment thread on Google. Can you find a post in a YouTube video comments section on Google?)<p>Heck, when I first heard about YouTube's autogenerated captions, my first thought was "oh, so this is Google building deep indexing of video through audio transcription, because they can't trust externally-provided subtitles, right?" But it's been 10 years, and I couldn't have been more wrong.