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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!

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4 Answers 4

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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.com to get videos by that user.

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Then click Search Tools and you will see Any Time come up as an option.

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Finally, click Any Time, choose Custom Range, and select the time frame you want to restrict your search to.

enter image description here

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

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  • Please do not use URL shorteners here.
    – ale
    Commented Oct 3, 2015 at 17:16
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Add after:(date of video) in your search.

For example: after:2013-03-29 will return anything upload after the 29th March 2013.

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  • And before, respectively.
    – Det
    Commented May 20, 2020 at 15:53
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Use after:year-month-day (inclusive) and before:year-month-day (exclusive).

E.g. for cat videos from 2012: cats after:2012-01-01 before:2013-01-01:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cats+after%3A2012-01-01+before%3A2013-01-01

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  • 1
    Welcome to Web Applications! Does that work for a search within a single channel too?
    – Glorfindel
    Commented May 21, 2020 at 6:56
  • @Glorfindel Yes.
    – Det
    Commented Jul 14, 2020 at 9:32
  • There seems to be a lot of results twice tho.
    – Det
    Commented Jul 14, 2020 at 17:48
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The interface doesn't allow that. You should be able to do it programmatically using the YouTube API (https://stackoverflow.com/q/1699099/395857) or automatically pushing the "load more" button at the bottom of http://www.youtube.com/user/MIT/videos?sort=da&view=0&flow=list (or the user you are interested in. Should be easy to do e.g. with Sikuli or JS).

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