youtube-search

YouTube Search

Search YouTube by keyword and return structured video metadata — title, URL, channel, views, duration, upload date. Uses yt-dlp for scraping with no API keys or OAuth required.

Prerequisites

uv tool install yt-dlp

Verify:

yt-dlp --version

Usage

Basic Search

yt-dlp "ytsearch10:claude code skills" --dump-json --flat-playlist --no-warnings 2>/dev/null \
  | jq -r '[.title, .url, .channel, .view_count, .duration_string, .upload_date] | @tsv'

• ytsearch10: — search YouTube, return 10 results (adjust number as needed)
• --dump-json — output metadata as JSON
• --flat-playlist — don't download, just list
• --no-warnings — suppress non-error output

Structured JSON Output

yt-dlp "ytsearch5:claude code mcp servers" \
  --dump-json --flat-playlist --no-warnings 2>/dev/null \
  | jq '{
    title: .title,
    url: .url,
    channel: .channel,
    views: .view_count,
    duration: .duration_string,
    upload_date: .upload_date,
    description: (.description // "" | .[0:200])
  }'

Search with Sorting

yt-dlp does not support server-side sort. To sort by views or date, capture all results and sort client-side:

# Sort by view count (descending)
yt-dlp "ytsearch20:AI agents 2026" \
  --dump-json --flat-playlist --no-warnings 2>/dev/null \
  | jq -s 'sort_by(-.view_count) | .[:10][] | {title, url, channel, views: .view_count}'

# Sort by upload date (newest first)
yt-dlp "ytsearch20:claude code tutorial" \
  --dump-json --flat-playlist --no-warnings 2>/dev/null \
  | jq -s 'sort_by(-.upload_date) | .[:10][] | {title, url, channel, upload_date}'

Search Result Count

The number after ytsearch controls how many results to fetch:

Pattern	Results
ytsearch5:query	5 results
ytsearch10:query	10 results (default recommendation)
ytsearch20:query	20 results
ytsearch50:query	50 results (slow, may hit rate limits)