Search YouTube with Google Script and YouTube API
This Google Script shows how to query the YouTube API to search videos by keywords. The source data is in a column in Google Spreadsheet and we connect to the YouTube Data API via Google Apps Script. The YouTube service should be in enabled in the Google Cloud Platform project.
function findYouTubeVideoByKeywords() {
// get the search query from Google Sheets
var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
var data = sheet.getDataRange().getValues();
// iterate through all rows in the sheet
for (var d = 1, l = data.length; d < l; d++) {
// find the top result only
var results = YouTube.Search.list('id,snippet', {
q: data[d][0],
maxResults: 1,
});
// was a matching video found on YouTube?
if (results.pageInfo.totalResults !== 0) {
var item = results.items[0];
var snippet = item.snippet;
var response = [
item.id.videoId,
snippet.title,
snippet.description,
new Date(snippet.publishedAt),
snippet.channelId,
snippet.channelTitle,
snippet.thumbnails['default']['url'],
];
// write the response to Google Sheet
sheet.getRange(d + 1, 4, 1, response.length).setValues([response]);
}
// add a sleep between calls to avoid hitting the rate limit
Utilities.sleep(1000);
}
// refresh the Google Spreadsheet
SpreadsheetApp.flush();
}
Amit Agarwal
Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion
Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.
Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory