YouTube Search Scraper

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Search YouTube by keyword and stream back structured results — videos, channels, and playlists — with built-in filters for upload date, view count, content type, and live/shorts.

Why use this actor

• No account / no API key required — just give it a query and the actor returns the same results YouTube shows on the web.
• Filter the way YouTube does — sort by relevance, upload date, view count, or rating; restrict to videos / channels / playlists; or narrow to today's or this week's uploads, live streams, or shorts.
• Mixed result types in one stream — videos, channels, and playlists are returned together, each tagged with a type discriminator so you can split them downstream.
• No quota limits — unlike the official YouTube Data API, runs are not capped by a daily quota; pay only for the results you receive.
• Bulk queries in one run — pass a list of search terms; every record is tagged with _input and _filter so you can join results back to your input list.
• Stable JSON output — every row carries _input, _filter, _source, _scrapedAt envelope fields, ready for pipelines, spreadsheets, and databases.

How it works

1. You provide one or more search queries (e.g. twice, python tutorial) and pick a filter.
2. The actor fetches search results the same way YouTube's web app does, then paginates with continuation tokens until it has gathered maxResults items per query.
3. Results stream into your dataset as flat JSON records, ready to download as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

You do not need to manage scrapers, browsers, or rotating IPs — all handled internally.

Input

{
"queries":[
"lofi hip hop",
"python tutorial"
],
"maxResults":20,
"filter":"relevance",
"proxyConfiguration":{
"useApifyProxy":true,
"apifyProxyGroups":["DATACENTER"]
}
}

filter options

Output

Input: queries: ["twice"], maxResults: 5, filter: "relevance" — the actor returns a mixed stream of videos and channels:

{
"type":"video",
"videoId":"i0p1bmr0EmE",
"title":"TWICE \"What is Love?\" M/V",
"channelTitle":"JYP Entertainment",
"channelId":"UCaO6TYtlC8U5ttz62hTrZgg",
"publishedTimeText":"8 years ago",
"lengthText":"3:44",
"viewCountText":"918,997,637 views",
"descriptionSnippet":"TWICE(트와이스) \"What is Love?\" M/V Spotify https://goo.gl/jVLYYY iTunes & Apple Music https://goo.gl/DKyKZf Google Music ...",
"thumbnails":[
{
"url":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/i0p1bmr0EmE/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEcCOADEI4CSFXyq4qpAw4IARUAAIhCGAFwAcABBg==&rs=AOn4CLA8eBN8cI0jbqpUfPBbCVH7jph99A",
"width":480,
"height":270
}
],
"_input":"twice",
"_filter":"relevance",
"_source":"S1-primary",
"_scrapedAt":"2026-05-18T10:42:57.499074+00:00"
}

{
"type":"channel",
"channelId":"UCzgxx_DM2Dcb9Y1spb9mUJA",
"title":"TWICE",
"descriptionSnippet":"TWICE Official YouTube Channel.",
"subscriberCountText":"19.3M subscribers",
"thumbnails":[
{
"url":"https://yt3.googleusercontent.com/rj-m7CQIV8hIHx_lB8cjs0NxrDFJaUkVwZ5tCnZTNSVEr2IqXGF-2e7nr7og1IGeRXtHikce=s176-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj-mo",
"width":176,
"height":176
}
],
"_input":"twice",
"_filter":"relevance",
"_source":"S1-primary",
"_scrapedAt":"2026-05-18T10:42:57.499074+00:00"
}

{
"type":"video",
"videoId":"FxkAkEaalB8",
"title":"TWICE (트와이스) PLAYLIST 2025 [UPDATED]",
"channelTitle":"FEARLIX",
"channelId":"UCqNQp_VOtVjQBOR_OhrizMA",
"publishedTimeText":"10 months ago",
"lengthText":"2:52:07",
"viewCountText":"765,898 views",
"descriptionSnippet":"TWICE (트와이스) is a nine-member girl group under JYP Entertainment, Formed through the reality show SIXTEEN. Group ...",
"_input":"twice",
"_filter":"relevance",
"_source":"S1-primary",
"_scrapedAt":"2026-05-18T10:42:57.499074+00:00"
}

… 2 more results in the same run.

Common fields (every row)

Video fields (type: "video")

Channel fields (type: "channel")

Playlist fields (type: "playlist")

Error envelope

Queries that fail to fetch return a structured error instead of crashing the run:

{
"_input":"some query",
"_error":"fetch_failed",
"_errorDetail":"network error or upstream rejection",
"_source":"S1-primary",
"_scrapedAt":"2026-05-18T10:42:57.499074+00:00"
}

Filter on _error to triage failed rows.

Pricing

This actor is billed per result: $3.50 per 1,000 results. Each video, channel, or playlist record = 1 result. Errors are not billed.

Other Sosmed Actors

Browse the full catalog at apify.com/xtracto.

Notes

• Result freshness — YouTube ranks search results dynamically; the same query rerun a few minutes later may return a slightly different order. Use _scrapedAt to track when each row was captured.
• Pagination — the actor chains continuation tokens automatically until maxResults is reached or YouTube returns no more pages. Very large maxResults values for narrow queries may end early simply because YouTube has no more results to give.
• Why filters help — relevance is broad and noisy for popular keywords. For trend monitoring, today or this_week give you only fresh uploads; for influencer discovery, channel_only strips out the videos; for view-driven research, view_count puts the biggest hits first.
• Counts as text — viewCountText, subscriberCountText, and publishedTimeText are returned as YouTube's localized strings ("918,997,637 views", "19.3M subscribers", "3 days ago"). Parse these client-side if you need numeric values.
• No deduplication — the actor does not deduplicate by videoId / channelId / playlistId across pages; downstream pipelines should dedupe if strict uniqueness is required.