I found a YouTube channel with news clips and needed to search a particular video which was uploaded in September 2011. I tried searching the video by tags but I cannot find it. However, YouTube doesn't give me the option to search by date – only sort the existing videos in that channel by date – which, IMHO, is kind of useless because I need to literally go through 1,000-2,000 videos.
How can I search a video that was uploaded on a channel at a certain date or between some dates?
In the end I successfully found the video I was looking for but I needed to write a Java application that used the YouTube API. Basically, https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/user or channel-id/uploads?max-results=50&start-index=X .
I played with X so that the results I was getting were between August and September 2011 and then I wrote a small application that would download the XML obtained by making a GET request to that URL, parse the title, date, URL and thumbnail picture of the movie and then create a new HTML page that displayed them all. After ~350-400 videos, I finally found the one I was looking for 🙂
Shame on you YouTube for not having a simple search by uploaded time feature!
Best Answer
Attack this from the outside.
Use Google's filtering capabilities.
For example, let's say I wanted to search for videos by user "MyAbridged" posted in August, 2012.
I search for
myabridged site:youtube.comto get videos by that user.Then click Search Tools and you will see Any Time come up as an option.
Finally, click Any Time, choose Custom Range, and select the time frame you want to restrict your search to.
Complete your search and you now have all the videos posted by that user in that time frame.
Example search: myabridged site:youtube.com between Aug 1, 2012 and Aug 31, 2012
Note that this search technically searches for any pages within Youtube that mention the name "MyAbridged" anywhere in the page, so it will actually return back more than just their videos, but it will get you where you need to go