In this video, I explain how to search through all YouTube comments using Google’s search engine. YouTube’s “Comment Search” utility does not function well, if at all. When attempting to use YouTube’s comment search, I found no results when searching for my username.
The method for searching and finding comments on YouTube is actually quite easy. It just took a bit of luck stumbling upon how it was actually done. The basic format for a Google search is as follows:
“Your search term here” site:www.youtube.com/all_comments
In the quotation marks, you include what you’re searching for in the comments section. The trick is what follows the “site:” command. You include “www.youtube.com/all_comments,” and this is what tells Google to search in the comments section of YouTube.
If you’ll notice, when you watch a YouTube video and you look in the comments section, you’ll see a link saying, “See all.” If you click that link, you will be brought to a page which contains all of the comments for the video you are watching. Upon seeing that address was similar for each and every video, I decided to try including that web address in my Google search and it worked!
The only problem is that it takes Google a long time to index the results for every single comment on YouTube. In Google’s search tools, you have the option to search for results within the last 24 hours, last week, last month, etc. If you search for comments in the last 24 hours, you’ll probably have a tough time because they probably won’t be indexed yet. Same with comments posted within the past week. It isn’t until you get into the last month and later that you get consistent results.
So, I hope that’s helped some people out with searching for comments. I know a lot of people have been complaining that YouTube’s “Comment Search” doesn’t work, and I’ve come to the same conclusion. Just use Google instead.
