Search youtube videos without invidious


Youtube

Invidious esta siendo bloqueado por YouTube fuertemente, solo nos queda yt-dlp.

yt-dlp "ytsearch20:linux kernel scheduling"

Option A — Use a public instance

Search:

site:searx.space YouTube

Then enable YouTube in the engine settings.

⚠️ Downside: instances can rate-limit.

Option B — Run your own (recommended)

git clone https://github.com/searxng/searxng
cd searxng
docker compose up -d

Then in settings.yml:

engines:
  - name: youtube
    engine: youtube_noapi
    enabled: true

This is exactly what you want: metadata-only YouTube scraping.

2️⃣ Command-line scraping: yt-dlp (search mode only)

You probably know yt-dlp for downloading — but it’s also a search scraper.

Example

yt-dlp "ytsearch20:linux kernel scheduling"

Metadata only (no download)

yt-dlp \
  --skip-download \
  --print "%(title)s | %(channel)s | %(duration)s | %(upload_date)s | %(id)s" \
  "ytsearch50:open source ai"

⚠️ If Google rate-limits you → use:

  • Tor
  • Rotating proxies
  • IPv6

3️⃣ RSS scraping (underrated & clean)

YouTube still exposes RSS feeds.

Channel RSS

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID

Search-based RSS (semi-documented)

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?search_query=linux+kernel

4️⃣ Headless scraping (Playwright / Puppeteer)

If Google is actively blocking everything else.

Stack

  • Playwright
  • Firefox (not Chromium)
  • Stealth mode
  • JS enabled

Flow

  1. Open youtube.com/results?search_query=...

  2. Scroll 2–3 times

  3. Extract:

    • #video-title
    • Channel
    • Views
    • Duration

⚠️ Downsides:

  • Heavy
  • Slower
  • Needs stealth tweaks
  • Overkill unless you’re indexing at scale

If you want zero blocks, this is the “boring adult” option.

Free tier

  • 10,000 units/day
  • ~100 searches/day (depending on params)

What you get

  • Clean JSON
  • No scraping hacks
  • Stable

⚠️ Requires:

  • Google account
  • API key
  • Some quotas

🔥 What I’d recommend for YOU

Given your vibe (anti-censorship, self-hosted, broke, technical):

Best combo

  1. SearXNG self-hosted
  2. yt-dlp for fallback
  3. RSS for monitoring

This gives you:

  • No Invidious
  • No watching
  • No Google account
  • Minimal censorship
  • Very hard to block

If you want, I can:

  • 🔧 Write a Python script that scrapes yt-dlp search into JSON
  • 🕷️ Build a mini YouTube indexer
  • 🌍 Show how to merge PeerTube + YouTube + Odysee into one search
  • 🧠 Help you make a Jackett-style indexer but for videos

Just tell me how far down the rabbit hole you want to go 🐇