Not sure what you're exactly asking for. Google/Youtube does provide an "official" API for youtube searches:
https://developers.google.com/youtube/data/reference/rest/v3...
It's rate-limited but other hacks to scrape Youtube without the API will also be rate-limited as well unless you try to trick Google via unapproved hostile methods such as commanding an army of residential ip zombies and aggregate it.
Fundamentally, the index of Youtube videos lives in Google's servers so you're beholden to Google to get results from it. If the issue is that the Google's official results from search queries are not surfacing the videos you think are actually there, it means you'd have to build a duplicate (massive) "shadow" index to return those missing videos. To build such a beast, you're back to hitting the brick wall of rate-limits again.
A script that streams clipboard changes.
Next i run a bunch of user services that do:
`await-clipboard.sh | grep --line-buffered -z -e "youtu" | ...`
I just use youtube like normal, but instead of clicking a video i right-click copy to clipboard and a mpv+sponsorblock window pops up
copy(
'yt-dlp ' +
[...document.querySelectorAll('ytd-video-renderer a#video-title')]
.map(a => {
const u = new URL(a.href);
return `"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=${u.searchParams.get('v')}"`;
})
.join(' ')
)Since youtube api won't help with this someone needs to build a video index and a good search algorithm on top. Would be nice to be able to search through indexed subtitles too.
It's intended to be used as a youtube-to-podcast-player tool, but seems like it fits your use, too.
That's kinda the nature of YouTube downloaders/scrapers including yt-dlp. It's not exactly a public API that YouTube's offering to support.
Many from my generation, who grew up during an era of information scarcity, have huge stashes of hoarded data. But what can we do with it? There is no way to legally share it, so we take it with us in our graves.
For this purpose I also kept list, in .yml files, for the most recent URL. Not just on youtube but also dailymotion etc...
Interestingly there are some surges of URLs suddenly being eliminated. Naturally we know the copyright mafia is trying to hinder us, the people here, but it is interesting how that works. Because ... it sometimes works. And then it does not work. Which is quite strange to me.
For instance, you can often still find new videos on youtube here, even full movies. Sometimes you can download them; then suddenly they are gone, but they were up before that for months or even years. So it is really really strange to see some videos suddenly vanishing, others being around for decades literally. Even when you'd assume these have ... "copyright issues".
I wanted to rewatch some of his videos recently and as far as I can tell most of his videos are now lost media. I should have downloaded them when I had the chance.
All automated for years
But yes, everyone should be not deleting the videos they've downloaded.
There's videos from ~15 years ago that I consider gone for good - lost to the great copyright apocalypse - having been unable to find them anywhere on the today's internet.