Can I search for channels which contain at least one video? - youtube-api

I am searching for channels against the YouTube API v3:
/search?part=id&type=channel&q=searchquery
Problem: It also returns channels which contain zero (0) videos.
I can see two possible approaches:
Use the &order=videoCount parameter, which sorts DESC the returned channels by the number of videos they contain.
Run a second query to search for videos in each channel, limit &maxResults=1 the returned amount of videos to one, and parse the result.
I don't want to take approach 1, as it changes the default &order=relevance, which I believe is fine-tuned by YouTube to return the most relevant channels first [still, the result may contain channels without videos, which makes YouTube's algorithm for calculating relevance questionable].
Approach 2 causes a lot of additional load, so it also isn't something that I'd want to do.
Is there a way to solve this in an elegant way that I don't see right now?

Approach 2 makes sense and assuming you'll use paging, you can run the second query as you need, instead of trying to run the query against the whole result set. That should be fine.

Related

Is there any limit to the number of rows returned by API?

I am making a bulk call with 30 posts and daily data of all. Is there any limits to the number of rows that will be returned by the API?
I am having problem getting the results.
Can anyone please help.
YouTube doesn't return any rows ... it's not relational data. That may sound like a pedantic thing to point out, but it's crucial for this next point; the API will return 50 videos at a time, along with tokens to get more results based on the same query, up to a total of 500 ... because the data isn't relational, you can't just "select all rows" that match a certain criteria. Rather, it is probabilistically determining relevance to your search parameters, and after about 500 results the algorithms don't have enough certainty to make additional results relevant.
So in your case, where you can change the date as needed (to allow the algorithms to be more specific), you'll want to do a series of calls; perhaps one at a time (since you have to paginate anyway to get more than 50 results, it's probably not that much more expensive in terms of network bandwidth).

Why limited number of next page tokens?

Through a script I can collect a sequence of videos that search list returns. The maxresults variable was set to 50. The total number items are big in number but the number of next page tokens are not enough to retrieve all the desired results. Is there any way to take all the returned items or it is YouTube restricted?
Thank you.
No, retrieving the results of a search is limited in size.
The total results that you are allowed to retrieve seems to have been reduced to 500 (in the past it was limited to 1000). The api does not allow you to retrieve more from a query. To try to get more, try using a number of queries with different parameters, like: publishedAfter, publishedBefore, order, type, videoCategoryId, or vary the query tags and keep track of getting different video id's returned.
See for a reference:
https://code.google.com/p/gdata-issues/issues/detail?id=4282
BTW. "totalResults" is an estimation and its value can change on the next page call.
See: YouTube API v3 totalResults field is returning 1 000 000 when it shoudn't

Searching two channels from youtube

I am trying to search for "Food+Show" from two youtube channels. ABCNetwork and FoxBroadcasting. The query I gave is
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?v=2&alt=jsonc&q=Food+Show&max-results=3&authors=ABCNetwork,FoxBroadcasting&prettyprint=true
The first result I got was id UKfLsIgJB1g where uploader is wafelsanddinges and not ABC or Fox. Please tell me why my query is not retuning correct result.
The parameter for the v2 data API is "author," not "authors." Unfortunately, fixing that won't solve the problem, as the retrieval of videos from a particular channel can only accept one author at a time. This is also true for v3 of the API.
The reason behind this is that the comma is treated as a concatenator, looking for a video that was published on FoxBroadcasting AND ABCNetwork (the use case for having multiple authors in that parameter is if you are retrieving activity feeds, in which case you want both feeds so having the comma serve as an AND is correct).
So for now, the only solution is two separate calls.

Max-results value is too high.YouTube API

I'm trying to load the first 100 videos of a YouTube channel and I can only load 50 videos. I always get this error message
Max-results value is too high. Only up to 50 results can be returned per query.
and I'm using this URL.
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/shaytards/uploads?&max-results=100
I'm not sure if I need any kind of developer key to load 100 results. Even if you know a way to load videos 75-100 would be great but any help would be appreciated.
The Youtube data API requires you to set up your own pagination if you need to get more than 50 results. In this case, then, you would set max-results to 50 and do the query, then on your page have some sort of "next" button (or however you want to implement your pagination) that would trigger a new call (either through ajax, a new page, or whatever your own workflow is). This new call would be to the same data feed, but you'd append the parameter &start-index=51 so that you'd get 50 more results, numbered 51-100. You can continue on like this up to 1000 results.
See https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/reference#Paging_through_Results for more details.
In the YouTube Data API V3 it is a little different. Each search query returns a "nextPageToken" that can be used in a subsequent query for more results. Documentation: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/guides/implementation/pagination

Need help to get more than 100 results using YouTube search API

Is there some way I can retrieve more than 100 results using YouTube API?
I can retrive upto 100 results using this query string:
https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q=football&orderby=relevance&start-index=1&max-results=10&v=2
But when I try
https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q=football&orderby=relevance&start-index=101&max-results=10&v=2
I get:
http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xmlns:openSearch='http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/' xmlns:gd='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005' gd:etag='W/"C0YFQHg9fyp7I2A9WhBVGUk."'>tag:youtube.com,2008:videos2013-04-26T01:51:51.667Zhttp://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind' term='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007#video'/>Videos matching: footballhttp://www.youtube.com/img/pic_youtubelogo_123x63.gifhttps://www.youtube.com'/>http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#feed' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?v=2'/>http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#batch' type='application/atom+xml' href='https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/batch?v=2'/>https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q=football&start-index=101&max-results=10&orderby=relevance&v=2'/>https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?alt=atom-service&v=2'/>https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q=football&start-index=91&max-results=10&orderby=relevance&v=2'/>YouTubehttp://www.youtube.com/http://gdata.youtube.com'>YouTube data API10010110
From what I understand, you can get 999 results using YouTube search API. Why is this limited to 100 here? Is there a workaround for me to get more than 100 results?
Thanks!
I can't speak to whether or not something has changed internally that is now capping totalResults at 100, but it seems to be a pretty common problem across the board today. However, if you were to try using v3 of the API, this wouldn't be an issue: for example, this query:
https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?q=football&part=id&key=YOUR_DEVELOPER_KEY
Will give you many, many more total results. With v3, you can set the maxResults parameter up to 50 videos returned for each response, and then paginate through the responses by setting the pageToken parameter to whatever the "nextPageToken" attribute of a given response is.
Try like this https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?q=football&orderby=relevance&v=2
It will take the default size. When you use the start index and size you are using the pagination mechanism. I guess thats the problem here. And misfortune is that Google youtube API supports only max of 50 videos per query. Its there in the docs. 999 videos are the total videos that can be in a video feed. Not the number of videos it would query out. Dont mistakenly take it as it would return you all the videos. You have to use pagination with start index and size inorder to go through all the videos.
you can use this url
https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?q=football&part=id&key=YOUR_DEVELOPER_KEY&max-results=150
and you easily get more than 100 results
I'm confused by this same issue - video search queries with start-index > 100 do not return any results:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?v=2&q=skateboarding+dog&max-results=50&start-index=101
and queries with a start-index < 100 return only the number of videos up to 100:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?v=2&q=skateboarding+dog&max-results=50&start-index=90
gives you 10 videos.
Shouldn't you be able to access results beyond the first 100 returned by the search?
There's a caching/escalating issue for pagination.
Check this answer here.
The correct way to page through a feed is to make the first request
for the feed without a start-index, and then check to see whether
there's a <link rel="next'...> and if so, use that URL to retrieve the
next page of a feed.
I discovered that if you put a small pause between each pagination call to API, it returns 400 results, it's mean 1 call per page putting 2 second between each call. It works for my. If you wuould like get more it, you have to close the connection to API and try again one or two minutes later.

Resources