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Show HN: A search engine for deleted YouTube videos (1.5B+ indexed since 2005)

tube.archivarix.net

14 pointsarchivarix12 comments

Search engine for YouTube content that's no longer on YouTube: deleted, removed, region-blocked, DMCA'd. ~1.5B videos indexed from 2005 onwards by aggregating archive sources Internet Archive Wayback Machine (CDX + HEAD-spread discovery), Common Crawl. What you get for any video ID: metadata (title, description, channel, upload date, duration, view counts, tags), thumbnails, original captions when the archive captured them, and reconstructed URLs to play the archived video file when available. Channel discovery reconciles legacy username/handle eras to a single canonical identity (lots of channels renamed themselves a dozen times — that part was painful).

would be great if they could recover youtube playlists - I recently discovered that clicking to edit your playlist can turn into an oops deletion when you are off my a milliliter - and there is no 'are you sure delete' modal - it's just gone.

searching for 'recovery my deleted youtube music playlist' basically says find the url and go to internet archive and pray. Mine was shown in two IA pages, but clicking to view list was some 404 type error.

I might not be able to help, but I’d like to give it a shot. Can I see the two IA links? If it was the “this page hasn’t been archived” error I’m less likely to be able to do anything, but I can check all the Common Crawl indexes and see if they have a copy of something useful.

oh wow, hadn't even thought of that! I put the url wayback machine at top of this post:https://steveiscritical.com/05/youtube-ui-ux-fail-delete-acc...

It's the 'rook' playlist that got deleted, ( when trying to edit playlist to change not so great thumbnail. )

Unfortunately I got the same result that archivarix did above, nothing in CC and nothing in IA. The thumbnail had a different link than the title of the playlist so I thought I’d try that, but the wayback machine redirects to the first video on the playlist, and there’s nothing in the common crawl. I also checked the html just in case there was a track listing hidden in there, but there wasn’t.

Really appreciate you taking the time and thinking of some alternative methods!

Not sure if there is a blocker from youtube in some way, but making backups of public playlists would certainly come in handy for a lot of people.

Seeing the articles and youtube videos and other articles about how to find your YT profile URL and searching the archive - obviously it's a thing bigger than I thought, and not something I ever considered.

I just thought to try putting “music” in place of “www” in the playlist url, but unfortunately IA and CC still have nothing.

It is possible to restore playlists; they may also be found on archive.org and Common Crawl. But I hadn’t considered how necessary that would be. Regarding this specific case - unfortunately, neither Wayback nor Common Crawl has a single snapshot of the URL youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1RY5RYlgymo2ooWvReUmkwCCcGv0l_gF for the full list of 116 tracks.

thanks for checking! I can see a big benefit in these being backed up, surely there are many others running into this issue.

Seems pretty cool. So this is a recent project, and you haven’t been working on this since 2005 right?

Have you considered also indexing videos that haven’t been deleted?

Update: So I mustered the courage to try the search engine, because it was looking not very much like a scam, and it becomes very apparent as soon as you use it that non-deleted videos are also indexed.

Yes, the database contains all the videos, both deleted and active ones. Or rather, not the videos themselves, but the metadata and links to the video files in the web archive. I don't have servers large enough to store the videos themselves.

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