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:

1{
2  "title": "Video Title",
3  "type": "video",
4  "channelName": "Channel Name",
5  "date": "2023-01-01T00:00:00Z",
6  "text": "Video description...",
7  "thumbnailUrl": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VIDEO_ID/hqdefault.jpg",
8  "order": 0,
9  "input": "search query",
10  "hashtags": ["hashtag1", "hashtag2"],
11  "channelId": "CHANNEL_ID",
12  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID",
13  "channelUsername": "username",
14  "numberOfSubscribers": 1000000,
15  "channelViewCount": 50000000,
16  "channelVideoCount": 500,
17  "hiddenSubscriberCount": false,
18  "channelCreatedAt": "2020-01-01T00:00:00Z",
19  "id": "VIDEO_ID",
20  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID",
21  "viewCount": 10000,
22  "likes": 1000,
23  "commentsCount": 100,
24  "commentsTurnedOff": false,
25  "duration": 180,
26  "keywords": ["keyword1", "keyword2"],
27  "isMembersOnly": false
28}

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

• The actor is subject to YouTube API quota limitations
• Focuses exclusively on video search results