Since youtube api won't help with this someone needs to build a video index and a good search algorithm on top. Would be nice to be able to search through indexed subtitles too.

   copy(
     'yt-dlp ' +
     [...document.querySelectorAll('ytd-video-renderer a#video-title')]
       .map(a => {
         const u = new URL(a.href);
         return `"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=${u.searchParams.get('v')}"`;
       })
       .join(' ')
   )

It's intended to be used as a youtube-to-podcast-player tool, but seems like it fits your use, too.

Not sure what you're exactly asking for. Google/Youtube does provide an "official" API for youtube searches:

https://developers.google.com/youtube/data/reference/rest/v3...

It's rate-limited but other hacks to scrape Youtube without the API will also be rate-limited as well unless you try to trick Google via unapproved hostile methods such as commanding an army of residential ip zombies and aggregate it.

Fundamentally, the index of Youtube videos lives in Google's servers so you're beholden to Google to get results from it.

> API key not valid. Please pass a valid API key.

That's kinda the nature of YouTube downloaders/scrapers including yt-dlp. It's not exactly a public API that YouTube's offering to support.

A script that streams clipboard changes.

Next i run a bunch of user services that do:

`await-clipboard.sh | grep --line-buffered -z -e "youtu" | ...`

I just use youtube like normal, but instead of clicking a video i right-click copy to clipboard and a mpv+sponsorblock window pops up

It worked decently well. However, I started running into API limits when it would refresh to fetch updates. Things could likely be tweaked to avoid this, but I haven’t revisited it yet.

I didn’t make a generic search, but did allow pulling up one-off videos to download and favorite them.

Something along these lines: https://github.com/Benexl/yt-x