YouTube Search API Actor This Apify actor provides a simple interface to search YouTube videos using the YouTube Data API. ## Features - Search YouTube videos with comprehensive metadata - Get up to 1000 video results in a single run - Automatic pagination handling behind the scenes - Full video statistics (views, likes, comments) - Channel information and statistics - HTML entities properly decoded for better readability ## Input Parameters The actor accepts the following input parameters: | Parameter | Type | Description | |-----------|------|-------------| | q | String | Required - The search query | | maxResults | Integer | The maximum number of items to return (1-1000, default: 100) | | useFilters | Boolean | Enable to use advanced filtering options | | channelType | String | The type of channel to search for (any, show) | | eventType | String | The event type to search for (completed, live, upcoming) | | order | String | The order to sort the results by (date, rating, relevance, title, videoCount, viewCount) | | publishedAfter | String | Only show content published after this date (RFC 3339 format) | | publishedBefore | String | Only show content published before this date (RFC 3339 format) | | regionCode | String | The region code for search results (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, e.g. US) | | relevanceLanguage | String | The language to search in (ISO 639-1 two-letter language code, e.g. en) | | safeSearch | String | Whether to include restricted content (moderate, none, strict) | | videoDefinition | String | Whether to search for HD or standard videos (any, high, standard) | | videoDuration | String | The duration of videos to search for (any, long, medium, short) | | videoLicense | String | The license of videos to search for (any, creativeCommon, youtube) | ## Output The actor outputs a structured dataset with comprehensive information about each video: json { "title": "Video Title", "type": "video", "channelName": "Channel Name", "date": "2023-01-01T00:00:00Z", "text": "Video description...", "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/hqdefault.jpg", "order": 0, "input": "search query", "hashtags": ["hashtag1", "hashtag2"], "channelId": "CHANNEL_ID", "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID", "channelUsername": "username", "numberOfSubscribers": 1000000, "channelViewCount": 50000000, "channelVideoCount": 500, "hiddenSubscriberCount": false, "channelCreatedAt": "2020-01-01T00:00:00Z", "id": "VIDEO_ID", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID", "viewCount": 10000, "likes": 1000, "commentsCount": 100, "commentsTurnedOff": false, "duration": 180, "keywords": ["keyword1", "keyword2"], "isMembersOnly": false } ## Authentication This actor uses an external token server to authenticate requests to the YouTube API. No additional authentication is required. ## Usage 1. Create a new task for the YouTube Search API actor on the Apify platform 2. Configure your search parameters 3. Run the task 4. Access the results in the task's dataset ## Advantages Over YouTube API Direct Use - Automatically handles pagination to get up to 1000 results - Combines multiple API endpoints (search, videos, channels) for comprehensive data - Properly decodes HTML entities in titles and descriptions - Extracts hashtags from video descriptions - Provides clean, consistent data format - No API key or quota management required ## Limitations - Focuses exclusively on video search results