Why YouTube doesn't let you search transcripts?

Because that would let you find what you want more quickly, so they wouldn't have as much time to show you ads.

I use https://filmot.com/ to search youtube captions. Found via Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/odj2gx/iv...

I hope you get a good answer to this.

I suspect Youtube cripples transcript usefulness because it aligns with what customers want. And customers are important to Youtube - while end users are something else.

i’ve been wondering the same about twitter / earthx audio spaces. the public ones are playable to the public and are transcribed with automation in real time.

many people listen to spaces after they’re over like a podcast or other form of broadcast recording.

searching public twitter space transcripts would allow us to find more relevant things to consume perhaps.

same with youtube. i wonder whether anything is logging and indexing these with a non-internal program; cursory searches seem to imply that it’s unlikely.

My guess is that it's just simply not worth it for them

check out https://lectura.xyz. It’s a really powerful chatbot built to analyze YouTube videos. You can also easily search the transcript and jump to specific times in the video

I generally copy / paste the whole transcript into Notepad++ then search it there as a workaround

Only somewhat related: I've been using a variant of the following LLM prompt, obtained from Raycast Prompt Explorer[1], to get summaries of YouTube videos before I watch them.

I use it with Raycast and the Raycast browser extension, but it's easily adapted for other AI browser extensions, as well as scripts and other launchers.

It's helped cut out a lot of cruft.

--BEGIN-PROMPT--

Create a summary of a YouTube video using its transcript. You will use the following template:

"""

## Summary

{Multiple sentences summarising the YouTube video}

## Notes

{Bullet points that summarize the key points or important moments from the video’s transcript with explanations}

## Quotes

{Extract the best sentences from the transcript in a list}

"""

Transcript: {browser-tab}

--END-PROMPT--

1. https://prompts.ray.so/