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YouTube Keyword Operators

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Matthew Wright edited this page Mar 30, 2023 · 31 revisions

YouTube keyword search provides several operators that you can use to filter and refine results. These can be useful both when searching YouTube normally and when using YouTube Geofind.

You can mix most of these together with varying degrees of success. Some work best when sorting results by date or relevance, some work all the time, and sometimes results that don't seem to match the query still come back.

Operator Example
OR | cat|kitten|kitty|"maine coon"
cat OR kitten OR kitty OR "maine coon"
Exact match "" "a specific phrase of words"
Exclude - cat -birman
cat -birman -persian multiple exclusions
cat -"maine coon" exclude phrase
Number/Dollar (range) #..# $100
$100..$500 A dollar amount between the two values
1990..2001 A number between the two values
Title contains intitle: cat intitle:test
Title contains all allintitle: allintitle: cat test
allintitle: cat 2000..2020
Description contains description: cat description:test
Date (range)
before:yyyy-MM-dd after:yyyy-MM-dd 		cat before:2017-01-01
cat after:2018-01-01 before:2018-01-31

There are potentially other operators but they don't seem useful or don't appear to work anymore. For example:

  • The + operator doesn't seem to do anything
  • The () operator doesn't seem immediately useful. The result is the same whether or not you use them with OR | queries.
  • Comma feature filters don't seem to work anymore , live, , hdr, , last hour, , channel, etc. even though they are mentioned in other search operator guides. Some appear to work at first but I believe its just adding that as a keyword instead of using it as a special filter.

Also, if searching for something in countries of different language(s), try translating words and phrases of what you are searching for as alternate versions in an OR query.

General Examples

Some examples combining operators that can be cool.

  • Untitled videos allintitle: DSC 0..9999 Search
  • Untitled videos allintitle: IMG 0..9999 Search
  • Untitled videos allintitle: 20000101..20303131 vid|mp4|mov|mkv|win Search
  • Videos likely titled with a date allintitle: 1990..2022 1..31 jan|mar|apr|may|jun|jul|aug|sep|oct|nov|dec -free -movie Search

Geofind Examples

There are several examples available by clicking the Random topic button on the keywords input. Aside from those more general ones, listed below are more specific examples of world events.

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