Youtube Custom RSS Search Results
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Update: The method described here is obsolete.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 After digging around a bit (really, just trial-and-error method), I found an unpublished (I think) way to create RSS feeds based on actual search results.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.
In the meantime, if you found this article useful, feel free to buy me a cup of coffee below.
beer planet is a blog about technology, programming, computers, and geek life. It is run by Artem Russakovskii - a local San Francisco geek who is currently pursuing his own projects and regularly enjoys hacking Android, PHP, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, Perl, and regular expressions, working on Wordpress plugins and tools, tweaking MySQL queries and server settings, administering Linux machines, blogging, learning new things, and other geeky stuff.
