Re:Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a chann...
by userbinator on Saturday May 20, 2023 @04:47AM
(#36010338)
e.g. standardized ARIA-accessible captions sources for the <video> element, etc.
YouTube could literally be a minimal web forum with a video tag in the first post of each thread, but likely due to DRM and related motivations, they instead wrap everything in thick layers of obfuscated JS.
For a while there were various shady-looking sites that seemed to scrape YouTube video pages (including comments) and I could sometimes find them through Google (then going back to YouTube for the original video), but within the past few years those have unfortunately also either been delisted/censored from search results or died out.
YouTube could literally be a minimal web forum with a video tag in the first post of each thread, but likely due to DRM and related motivations, they instead wrap everything in thick layers of obfuscated JS.
Comments were easily indexable too, before that was also removed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11053204
For a while there were various shady-looking sites that seemed to scrape YouTube video pages (including comments) and I could sometimes find them through Google (then going back to YouTube for the original video), but within the past few years those have unfortunately also either been delisted/censored from search results or died out.