YouTube Search Video Scraper

Search YouTube and export a clean video list (video URL/ID, title, thumbnail, views text, publish date, duration, channel metadata) using an Apify Actor.

This actor is focused on search results (not individual watch pages, and not downloading video files).

Common use cases: keyword monitoring, content discovery, competitor research, and building video catalogs.

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What this actor can do

• Accept multiple search queries (keywords).
• Extract search result video items such as:
  • query
  • video_id, video_url
  • title
  • thumbnail_url
  • view_count_text (as shown on the list page)
  • publish_date (as shown on the list page)
  • video_duration
  • channel_id, channel_username (when available from renderer)

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Input

Configure these fields in the Actor’s Input tab in the Apify Console:

searchQueries (required)

A list of YouTube search queries (keywords).

Supported examples:

• openai
• apify actor
• site:youtube.com web scraping

maxPage (optional)

Maximum number of pages to paginate per query.

Notes:

• Page 1 is the initial search response.
• Pages 2+ are fetched via continuation tokens.

type (optional)

Search result type filter:

• Video (default)
• Short
• Movie

uploadDate (optional)

Filter by upload date:

• Today
• ThisWeek
• ThisMonth
• ThisYear

duration (optional)

Filter by video duration:

• Under3Minutes
• Between3And20Minutes
• Over20Minutes

sortBy (optional)

Sort order:

• Relevance (default)
• Popularity (maps to YouTube’s “View count” sort)

country (optional)

Two-letter country code used for Apify Proxy country targeting (where requests originate from). This can affect localized results and availability.

• Default: US
• Supports any ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code (two letters). Suggested values prioritize common developed-country regions.
• Examples: US, GB, DE, JP, AU, CA

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Output

Results are stored in the default dataset.

Each dataset item includes:

• query
• type (Video, Short, Movie)
• rank (1-based position in the search results for that query)
• channel_id (when available)
• channel_username (when available)
• video_id, video_url
• title, description, thumbnail_url
• mentions[]
• hashtags[]
• view_count_text, short_view_count_text
• publish_date
• video_duration
• yt_status (ok, not_found, error)
• crawled_at

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Legal & ethical notice

You are responsible for ensuring your use of this actor complies with:

• YouTube’s Terms of Service
• Applicable laws and regulations (privacy, data protection, etc.)

Only scrape data you have the right to access.