Youtube channel search

Skill dedene/skills/skills/youtube-channel-search

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.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add dedene/skills --skill youtube-channel-search

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

13 stars13 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

SKILL.md

2.9 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

YouTube Channel Search

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

Build a channel catalog with yt-dlp.
Rank likely videos from metadata.
Fetch transcripts only for the shortlist.
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.