YouTube Filters not Working? Follow These Steps
YouTube users reported that YouTube filers were not working. This happened all over the world. When searching for a query and setting the upload date filter to something as recent as the last hour or day, the results from days, weeks, or months ago were being displayed. This was across mobile apps and YouTube on the web, naturally prompting a lot of complaints.
Google has admitted that this was an intentional move and Google purposefully turned off the filters. Following is a Google’s Employee statement on a support forum as follows:
YouTube is aware the search/sorting functions aren’t working as expected – this is temporary and part of our efforts to better respond, review and remove graphic, violative content from YouTube. Thanks for your patience while we work through this. Will update this thread when these features are working normally again, feel free to subscribe for updates.
For complete details of YouTube’s effort to take down hate and violative, have a look at our article on YouTube Takedown Of Hate-Speech.
Filter functionality:
The YouTube filter function allows a user to search for videos and then filter them based on the following:
- The length of the video, e.g. less than 4 minutes
- When the video was published on YouTube, e.g. in the past hour.
- The quality of the video, e.g. HD
This means that if your search query is “how to make the perfect cake” then you can filter the results
- that are short e.g. less than 4 minutes,
- have been released e.g. in the past 1 week – i.e. they’re the latest.
- are in high definition
Filter Functionality is Back:
A few days after when the filters were taken down, an update was added to the above-said forum post stating that the “search and sorting functions are working normally again”.
Solution if it happens again:
If such an enforced outage happens again, and you need to have the filtering option, follow the steps mentioned below:
- Open Google and navigate to the home page.
Open Google.com - In the “search-box”, type your query e.g. “how to make the perfect cake” followed by “site:youtube.com”, so your query will be
how to make the perfect cake site:youtube.com
and hit enter
- In the results appearing, click on the “Videos” tab.
- And Then click on “Tools” which will bring Google’s filtering options.
Use Google’s Filter Options - Now use these filters of Google as per your liking to narrow down the search for what you are looking for.
It’s not as good as YouTube’s search filters, you are habitual of, but it can get the job done. Keep enjoying!
