Hey Guys! 👋

Following up on my last post about the Channel Scraper, I want to share another tool we just published to help you extract YouTube data at scale without wrestling with quotas.

If you’ve ever built a YouTube search scraper using the official YouTube Data API, you know the headaches: managing API keys, handling complex pagination, and having to make separate API calls just to get the actual video stats (views, likes, comments) and channel details.

To solve this, I built the YouTube Search API Actor.

It provides a simple interface to scrape YouTube search results with comprehensive metadata, automatically combining multiple API endpoints into one clean dataset.

🚀 Why use this over the direct YouTube Data API?

• No API Key Required: It authenticates via an external token server, meaning zero quota management on your end.
• Auto-Pagination: It handles pagination behind the scenes to fetch up to 1,000 video results in a single run.
• Combined Endpoints: Instead of just getting search results, it automatically fetches full video statistics AND channel statistics at the same time.
• Clean Data: Automatically decodes HTML entities in titles/descriptions and extracts hashtags into a clean array.

🎛️ Advanced Search Filters

You aren't just limited to basic keyword searches. The Actor supports all the advanced filtering options you need to get highly targeted datasets:

• Sort/Order: By Date, Rating, Relevance, Title, Video Count, or View Count
• Date Range: Filter by publishedAfter and publishedBefore (RFC 3339 format)
• Location & Language: Set specific regionCode (e.g., US) and relevanceLanguage
• Video Specifics: Filter by Duration (short, medium, long), Definition (HD/Standard), and License (Creative Commons/YouTube).
• Live/Events: Search for Live, Upcoming, or Completed broadcasts.

📋 What does the output look like?

You get a rich, structured dataset (exportable as JSON, CSV, Excel, etc.) that includes video metrics, channel metrics, and extracted keywords.

JSON

{
  "title": "Video Title",
  "id": "VIDEO_ID",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID",
  "text": "Video description...",
  "viewCount": 10000,
  "likes": 1000,
  "commentsCount": 100,
  "duration": 180,
  "date": "2023-01-01T00:00:00Z",
  "hashtags": ["hashtag1", "hashtag2"],
  "keywords": ["keyword1", "keyword2"],
  "channelName": "Channel Name",
  "channelUsername": "username",
  "numberOfSubscribers": 1000000,
  "channelViewCount": 50000000,
  "channelVideoCount": 500
}

🔗 Try it out & Build Your Stack

👉Get the YouTube Search API Actor Here

Note: This Actor currently focuses exclusively on video search results (not playlists or standalone channels in the search feed).

If you are building a complete content analysis pipeline, this pairs perfectly with our other tools:

• YouTube Channel Scraper(For deep-diving into specific competitors)

Let me know what you think! If you have any feature requests (like adding playlist search support) or find any bugs, drop a comment below or open an issue on the Apify platform.

Happy scraping! 🕷️