youtube-channel-search

name	youtube-channel-search
description	Research topics inside a known YouTube channel without a YouTube Data API key. Use when the user provides a YouTube channel URL/handle and wants to find, rank, shortlist, or investigate videos relevant to a topic using channel metadata and optional transcript text.

YouTube Channel Search

Search inside a known YouTube channel with a reproducible local workflow:

1. Build a channel catalog with yt-dlp.
2. Rank likely videos from metadata.
3. Fetch transcripts only for the shortlist.
4. Rank transcript text for the final answer.

Prefer this over browser automation. Use agent-browser only for manual UI checks or auth/consent fallbacks.

Quick Start

python3 <this-skill-dir>/scripts/youtube-channel-search.py catalog \
  'https://www.youtube.com/@CHANNEL/videos' \
  --output-dir /tmp/channel-research \
  --mode flat \
  --limit 300

python3 <this-skill-dir>/scripts/youtube-channel-search.py catalog \
  'https://www.youtube.com/@CHANNEL/videos' \
  --output-dir /tmp/channel-research \
  --mode full \
  --limit 140

python3 <this-skill-dir>/scripts/youtube-channel-search.py search \
  /tmp/channel-research \
  'landing pages storytelling websites' \
  --since 2024-06-17 \
  --top 20

python3 <this-skill-dir>/scripts/youtube-channel-search.py fetch-transcripts \
  /tmp/channel-research \
  'landing pages storytelling websites' \
  --since 2024-06-17 \
  --top 15

python3 <this-skill-dir>/scripts/youtube-channel-search.py rank-transcripts \
  /tmp/channel-research \
  'landing pages storytelling websites' \
  --top 10

Workflow

• Start with catalog --mode flat for a fast title-only index.
• Use catalog --mode full --limit N when dates/descriptions matter. Full mode is slower because it visits each video page, but it enables --since and better ranking.
• Use search for the metadata shortlist. This prints compact ranked results and stores search-results.json.
• Use fetch-transcripts only for likely candidates. It calls the sibling youtube-transcript skill and writes transcript artifacts under transcripts/.
• Use rank-transcripts for the final list. It reads transcript.txt, scores local content, and prints snippets.

Files

Default output directory:

channel-research/
├── catalog-flat.ndjson
├── catalog-full.ndjson
├── search-results.json
└── transcripts/
    └── VIDEO_ID/
        ├── metadata.compact.json
        ├── transcript.json
        ├── transcript.md
        └── transcript.txt

Notes

• yt-dlp is required.
• Date filters use YYYY-MM-DD or YYYYMMDD. Records with no date are kept, not discarded, because flat catalogs usually omit upload dates.
• The search ranking is lexical, not embedding-based. For broad conceptual research, fetch more transcripts and let the final agent reasoning judge the shortlist.
• Keep large channel artifacts in /tmp unless the user asks to persist them in the repo.