Youtube Custom RSS Search Results
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Updated: June 6th, 2008
Update: The method described here is obsolete. Youtube and Google released a beautiful API located here: http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/developers_guide_protocol.html. You can do everything mentioned in this article and a lot more using it. Here's a sample: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?alt=rss&racy=include&vq=BBC+Five&start-index=201&max-results=50
So it looks like YouTube updated its RSS page recently and now has the ability to create RSS feeds by tags or user, like so:
Tags:
For example, if you wanted to create an RSS feed for the tag "monkey," you would enter: http://www.youtube.com/rss/tag/monkey.rss
Users:
http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/[insert_username_here]/videos.rss
For example, if you wanted to create an RSS feed for the user "YouTube," you would enter: http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/youtube/videos.rss
The search by tag approach, however, won't necessarily get complete results because it will depend on user tagging the videos. After digging around a bit (really, just trial-and-error method), I found an unpublished (I think) way to create RSS feeds based on actual search results.
Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/rss/search/[SEARCH_TERMS].rss
For example, http://www.youtube.com/rss/search/steve%20irwin.rss.
The number of results returned seems to be capped at 20. If anyone figures out a param to get this increased, please comment.
Artem Russakovskii is a San Francisco programmer, blogger, and future millionaire (that last part is in the works). Follow Artem on Twitter (@ArtemR) or subscribe to the RSS feed.
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The /rss/search/ url still performs a tag only search
After hacking around for a bit I found that if you prepend 'title:' to the keywords it _will_ do a title based search
ex: /rss/search/title:steve+irwin.rss
The only downside is that this does a *title only* search. It doesn't do a mixed tag/title search.
w0rmw00d, that's not really true. For example, I just did the search on the same http://www.youtube.com/rss/search/steve%20irwin.rss and this was one of the results:
http://youtube.com/?v=76Bbpa6RJok
Title: steve irwin-all of the words
Description: steve irwin
Author: newsboyschic
Keywords: religious
Added: March 30, 2008
It doesn't have any steve irwin tags, yet it came up, so things seem to work.
Thanks for the tip! I also added sort by and a MINUS and it worked fine.
http://www.youtube.com/rss/search/VMWARE+-FUSION&search_sort=video_date_uploaded.rss
I am now trying to get DOPPLER to download the videos..
This is exactly what I am looking for.
search_sort parameter as suggested by Carlos didn't work for me. It just ignores that parameter.
The rss results dont contain description? any solution for that?
Please see the note at the top of the post – you have to use the gdata API which contains descriptions.