Search FAQs

Filmot cannot limit search results or matches to your YouTube watch history.

For your subscribed channels, you can build the list yourself and search only inside it:

• In the channel lookup box on the home page, subtitle search or metadata search, type a channel name and click a suggestion. You can also paste a comma-delimited list of handles or UC channel IDs, for example @LinusTechTips,@JerryRigEverything,@Dave2D,@GamersNexus. Handles and channel IDs can be mixed in one list.
• Use up to 200 selected channels per search.
• If an Include/Exclude switch is shown, choose Include to search only inside the selected channels.

To reuse the list, bookmark the search page. Signed-in users can also save a search with its selected channels; see Saved Searches.

Filmot keeps a search's filters in its URL. Set the filters you want and bookmark the results page. Reopening the bookmark restores those selections, and you can change the search term while reusing the filters. Because the URL contains your search terms, filters and selected channels, anyone you share a bookmarked link with can see them, so check a link before sharing it.

To keep a named query, sign in and click the bell button on subtitle or metadata search. A saved search retains its query, filters and selected channels, together with a name and optional description. Manage it on Saved Searches.

You can also enable a daily email digest to receive newly found matches automatically. Saved searches require an account, while bookmarking a filtered URL does not.

Filmot does not provide unrestricted regular-expression or regex search across its full subtitle database. Use the supported search operators and metadata filters to narrow the results instead.

You can match exact phrases in double quotes, list alternatives with |, exclude terms with -word, group conditions with parentheses, use * for one word inside a quoted phrase, and search nearby terms with proximity or NEAR operators. Channel, upload date and other filters can further restrict the matching videos.

For example, "CRISPR cas9" | "CRISPR-Cas9" | "CRISPR Cas 9" searches several spelling or transcription variants. The ? icon beside the search box opens the syntax guide with additional examples.

Filmot does not currently offer a filter or sort for subtitle difficulty, vocabulary difficulty or a language-learning level. You cannot select videos by an easy-to-hard score or learner category.

Metadata search can narrow videos by detected language, manual subtitle languages, upload dates and other video details. Those filters identify available languages and metadata; they do not measure how easy the captions are to understand.

Metadata search includes a Show Trends chart for matching videos. After running a search, open the chart to see weekly totals for videos, channels and recorded views, grouped by video upload date.

These are trends in the videos matching your query, rather than the number of searches people make, as measured by Google Trends. The view figures are stored counts, not live YouTube statistics.

To focus on a period, zoom the chart and click Filter By Chart Dates. Filmot reruns the search using that upload date range.

Yes. In metadata search, unlisted video search and channel listings, a video's title opens its Filmot video page, including the side-by-side subtitle view when tracks are available. The title link works the same way for available and unavailable videos.

A separate arrow link opens the video on YouTube. The IA link opens its Internet Archive or Wayback Machine record; an archived copy is available only for some videos.

The basic Channel Search page does not provide country, join-date or subscriber filters, or a subscriber-count sort. Results show the stored subscriber count and the channel's country when one is supplied, but join date is not shown in that results list.

Country information is self-reported by the channel owner, and many channels leave it blank. To filter video results by a channel's country, use the Country field in Metadata search.

Video sorting is separate from channel lookup. Subtitle search can sort videos by Channel Rank, but that score is not the same as subscriber count. The API's advanced channel-search endpoint has its own documented filters; those do not imply equivalent controls on the basic website page.

Filmot can index information only while it is accessible to the service. If a deleted, private or terminated-channel video became unavailable before Filmot collected its details, Filmot cannot reconstruct its missing title, subtitles or other metadata from its ID alone.

Filmot does not accept user-submitted historical records for addition to the index. To check an existing record, select the channel in Metadata search; a half-star Partial data icon indicates an incomplete record.

The IA links in video listings let you check for independently archived copies on the Internet Archive. Filmot does not store the video or audio files. For videos still publicly accessible, Patreon supporters can use Prioritized Channels to improve indexing coverage.

No. Filmot does not accept uploaded, crowdsourced or otherwise user-submitted subtitles, captions or transcripts. It indexes caption data collected from publicly accessible YouTube videos.

This also applies to transcripts from members-only or other non-public videos. Filmot cannot fetch their captions, and supplying a transcript yourself does not add it to the index. Basic metadata for members-only and age-restricted videos may still appear in Metadata search.

No, the code behind Filmot is not open source.

If you want programmatic access to Filmot's data, Filmot offers a public, self-service API. Sign in, open API Keys, accept the Terms of Service and create a key. Each account can have up to five active keys. Every account has a monthly API credit allowance, and Patreon supporters receive larger allowances according to their tier. See the API documentation for details.