Video:How to Search Effectively on YouTube

Transcript:How to Search Effectively on YouTube

This is Jesse with About.com and this video contains info on searching effectively on YouTube. YouTube is a video sharing website that allows anyone and everyone to upload and share their own videos, personal, professional and other.

Browse or Search on YouTube

For a general video browsing experience, from YouTube’s homepage I can click on Browse which then allows me to filter by category. I can click on the drop down button to the right of categories and a list of video categories that I may want to choose from, will appear. Perhaps I was too busy at work today to watch YouTube content and am now interested in finding out about the most popular videos of the day were. I can scroll down and click on - most viewed today. I will be taken to a new page that has the videos with today's highest views including both viral and professional content.

Search for Viral Videos

Here is an example of searching for a viral video on YouTube. I’m going to search for one of my favorite YouTube viral videos. The video shows a father and daughter singing a version of the Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros song, "Home." I will navigate up to the YouTube search bar and enter the name of the song. My instant search results give me a good suggestion and so I’ll click on the it, the song title and artist. Several results come up.

To try and find the video I am looking for I can navigate to the filter menu and in this case I’m going to choose sort by view count, because I know that the video I am looking for was extremely popular and it would have a high view count. My sorted results appear and there is the video I am looking for, I recognize it by its thumbnail and I see that it has 16 million plus views, the most views of any video on this page.

Filter Videos by Most Viewed

In another example, I am going to pretend I am looking for a funny viral cat video. After typing cat video into the search bar I am going to again filter by view count, so I can be sure I am seeing the most popular and most viewed cat videos. Perhaps I specifically want to see NEW cat videos only. I can filter by upload date and the most recently uploaded cat videos will appear first for me.

Search by YouTube Channel

In another example I would like to view a Lady Gaga video. I will type lady gaga into the search bar. I see that Lady Gaga’s official YouTube channel is the first result. Often popular artists and musicians will have their own YouTube channels, and these results will usually appear first in searches for their music. Musicians YouTube channels are basically versions of their own, controlled, websites within YouTube. They usually have all high quality content as well.

Now, within lady gaga’s YouTube channel, I can view a lot of different video content that has been officially uploaded by her team. If I know I want to view lady gaga’s YouTube channel only, after searching for lady gaga, I can click on filter and then I see the option for her channel. I can click on that and her channel will immediately come up as the top result.

Thanks for watching. For more information on searching in YouTube and other websites visit about.com.