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How can I add a YouTube search to my site?

I'm addicted. First it was America's Funniest Home Videos, now it's YouTube. There are just too darn many hilarious videos on the site. What I really want, though, is to be able to add a YouTube search to my own site so people can easily find all the funny stuff there. Is that doable?

Dave's Answer:

This is becoming a habit, reverse engineering search engines on popular Web sites! you name the site, from eBay to Google, and I've written about how to add a search box for that particular site on your own website, blog or social network profile page.

The good news is that it's a fun task, at least if you're a bit of an HTML geek like I am, and it's also a chance to dig into a high-powered Web site and see a bit about what they're doing behind the scenes.

The first step with this task is always to go to the site and choose File --> View Source. It opens up and almost always you'll be terrified at how ugly things are. YouTube is, however, rather surprisingly different:

Even with this nicely formatted source, it's still a bit tricky to identify the exact section of HTML that powers the search. Easiest solution is to search for <form, which produces the following:

<form id="search-form" action="/results" method="get" name="searchForm">
<input id="search-term" name="search_query" type="text" onkeyup="goog.i18n.bidi.setDirAttribute(event,this)" value="" maxlength="128" />
<select class="search-type" name="search_type">
<option value="">Videos</option>
<option value="search_users" >Channels</option>
</select>
<input id="search-button" type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

Truth be told, there's some superfluous material in this search form that makes it pretty on the YouTube page, but is really pretty irrelevant for a simple text search on your own site. Here's that same form with the extras all stripped out:

<form action="/results" method="get">
<input name="search_query" type="text" maxlength="128" />
<select name="search_type">
<option value="">Videos</option>
<option value="search_users">Channels</option>
</select>
<input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

Almost there. We need to do one more thing: fix the "action" attribute since it's assuming that you're on the YouTube site but if the code's going to be on your own site, that assumption will be false. Easily done:

Now we're cookin'! To have the results open in a new window (a common request I see for my seach code) we'll add one more attribute to the form tag too:

Now here's the full code:

<form action="http://www.youtube.com/results" method="get" target="_blank">
<input name="search_query" type="text" maxlength="128" />
<select name="search_type">
<option value="">Videos</option>
<option value="search_users">Channels</option>
</select>
<input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

and here it is in action:

You can spiff it up further if you'd like, adding tiny YouTube logos as bling or whatever, but that basic code should give you the search you seek for your site, and good luck to you!

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Categorized: CGI Scripts and Web Site Programming (Article 7919)
Tagged: google video, reverse engineering, search engines, youtube
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Comments

Do you have a way of making the results and movie play in the same window?

Posted by: Please correct the error at April 11, 2008 5:29 PM

The only way of doing this is using frames!

Unless you are good enough at PHP to send a GET request to the page, capture the HTML and echo it back on yours. (Seeing as you asked the question Im assuming you don't).

You should create a new page containing Dave's search, include it on the frame you want within a frame and the searchw ill load in the frame...Remove Daves _blank target though =).

Cheeeers,

Darren

Posted by: darren at April 14, 2008 3:17 AM

Change only [ method="get" ]

[method="post" ]

Posted by: Jura at April 23, 2008 3:38 PM

Jura,

That wouldnt work - the method is how you propose the data to the page - it doesnt determine where it will be displayed.

Posted by: Darren at April 24, 2008 5:37 AM

Exclent work ...
Thanks
Dave Taylor

Posted by: Ullas at June 12, 2008 4:26 PM

is there anyway to preload the search with a word??

Posted by: cybill at November 25, 2008 4:35 PM

Yeah to preload the search with a word just use the tag value="yourword" in the <input name="search_query" type="text" maxlength="128" />
part. So it would read <input name="search_query" type="text" maxlength="128" value="yourword"/>

Im interested in hearing about displaying the results on my site using PHP if anyone can send me in the right direction to do that? I'm new to PHP but have a good grasp of it.

Posted by: Ollie Barnett at December 29, 2008 12:19 PM

It seems that my code has been extracted to prevent injection! Nice! What you want to do is put the command value="your word" in the same tag that begins with input name. It should go at the end of this tag just before the tag closes repacing "yourword" with the word you want to use and leaving it in inverted commas.

Though if you want to do this you can get a widget from Google which will search only specific videos you want or display a list of your chosen videos etc. Google youtube widgets.

Posted by: Ollie Barnett at December 29, 2008 12:24 PM

can you help on that tiny thing ? when i search in hebrew it gives question mark ?? results from my site. somehow from here it gives correct results.

why is that?

i have just copyied and paste to my html page and it gives ??? results.

Posted by: mosho at February 5, 2009 3:23 AM

hello,
how can i add a site in my website, the site is www.shiatv.net, i wants to add this in my website...only a link.

thank you

Posted by: alveez at September 11, 2009 1:56 AM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!