With thousands of minutes of videos uploaded to YouTube each minute, it becomes an organizational challenge to make available those contents to a worldwide audience.
While YouTube displays a selection of videos that it believes may interest you on the frontpage of the service, either by looking up your country and display top videos watched by others from that country, or by displaying videos based on your past viewing history or subscriptions, it is not really enough in terms of discovery.
What many YouTube users do not know is that you can easily find interesting videos on YouTube using advanced search parameters.
An example? You get different results if you search for Bruce Lee, or if you search for Bruce Lee, movie. Lets take a look at important search parameters and how they affect the search results on the site.
Note: You add the advanced parameters at the end of the search phrase, and separate it with a comma from the search phrase.
Tip: You can combine multiple parameters in a single search, e.g. Bruce Lee, movie, HD to find HD movies about or starring Bruce Lee.
Search for full-length movies
You find a collection of -- mostly -- legal full-length movies on YouTube. It is not that easy to search for them using the regular search, but if you add ,movie after your query, you search for full-length movies exclusively.
Tip: To get lots of results, use single letter searches such as a, movie as it will return the majority of movies hosted on YouTube.
Limit search results by time
When you run a standard search on YouTube, all results are displayed to you. If you want to limit the results based on time, for instance to only get results for a recent event or announcement, then you may want to use the following parameters (using Windows 8 as an example):
Only return HD videos
If you want to make sure that you only get search results that offer HD quality, use the following parameter to do so:
Search only for playlists
If you want to search only for playlists, use the ,playlist parameter to do so.
By playtime
Another option that you have is to filter the results by playtime. YouTube supports the parameters short and long only.
Other parameters
Here is a list of other parameters that you may find useful:
Closing Words
While it is possible to apply those filters after you have ran a search -- by clicking on the Filters menu at the top -- it means that the page will be reloaded before the filtered list of results is displayed to you.
Using the parameters right away ensures that you see results right after you have hit enter or clicked on the search button on YouTube.
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Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.
Thanks for this! Really helpful
I wants to search Funny videos updated daily less then 4 mins and with most views. I type in YouTube search box ” funny, today, short ” Here i stuck how to add most views filter in this query. Please help me.
Thank you very much, Martin.
Your articles are an invaluable source of information for me, even though I no longer have to use Windows.
I am afraid I have not conveyed my appreciation before, because I am an Aspie, and the expertise of your other commentators intimidates me.
Congratulations,
Chris.
Chris, thanks for the praise. I appreciate any comment that is worded politely, and I’m quite sure that most users feel the same way. So, please, comment more :)
Very good tip, thank you very much!
more tips please