YouTube Search Scraper

Find YouTube videos with a search phrase and export clean rows for research, content planning or channel discovery. No YouTube API key is required.

Quick start

Enter What do you want to find?, choose your total video limit and click Start. The form prefills a 20-video example so the first run stays small.

{"query": "python tutorial", "maxResults": 20}

Open Videos for results or Query coverage for the SUMMARY report. Export the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel. API callers can send the same JSON above.

Input and compatibility

• query: one search phrase; the simplest input.
• queries: optional legacy list (or API string). When nonempty, it takes precedence over query. Blank phrases are removed and duplicate phrases run once.
• maxItems: maximum results per query, unchanged default 100, range 1–1000.
• maxResults: optional total row cap across queries. It has no API default; without it, the legacy per-query limit applies. Queries run in input order.
• Legacy mode: "search" is still accepted and needs no configuration.

{"queries": ["python tutorial", "javascript tutorial"], "maxItems": 10, "maxResults": 15}

This returns at most 10 rows for the first query and at most 5 for the second. A video matching multiple queries can appear once per query, preserving attribution. Within each query, duplicate video IDs are removed.

Output

Existing fields remain: query, video_id, title, channel, channel_url, duration, views, views_text, published_time, thumbnail, url, source, scraped_at.

Additional fields make exports easier to use:

Field	Meaning
rank	1-based order among returned videos for this query
duration_seconds	Numeric duration when a standard duration is available; otherwise null
description	Search-result description snippet when supplied by YouTube; otherwise null
channel_id	Stable YouTube channel ID when supplied; otherwise null

Views are best-effort numeric conversions; published_time remains YouTube's relative text, not an invented publication timestamp. Search snippets are not full descriptions. Live streams and unavailable metadata can have null fields. Search uses English/US presentation for more consistent numeric parsing; results can still vary by location and time.

Coverage and failures

SUMMARY records total rows and each query's count/status. Failed queries or interrupted pagination mark partial: true; queries skipped because the global cap was reached are recorded explicitly. Review this report before treating a run as complete. If every query produces zero rows, the run fails rather than reporting a successful empty scrape. YouTube consent pages, blocks and upstream changes can prevent results; no universal success guarantee is made.

Pricing and support

The existing Actor pricing is unchanged. See the live Pricing tab for current charges; result limits bound output volume but do not guarantee the final cost. For an issue, provide the run ID and a minimal reproducible input in the Actor Issues tab. Never include credentials.