A search engine for deleted YouTube videos (1.5B+ indexed since 2005)
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HN · launched May 9, 2026 · 14 upvotes (top 33%) · 0 views
Niche: multimedia and records search engines · 74 launches, 4 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Search & retrieval
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 74 launches in multimedia and records search engines →
Could you build this?
No Indexing 1.5+ billion records from petabytes of web archive data (Common Crawl, Wayback Machine) requires massive distributed data pipelines and search infrastructure beyond vibe coding.
What it would actually take: A production version requires running large-scale Apache Spark or Ray batch jobs across hundreds of Common Crawl WARC/WAT/WET dumps and Internet Archive CDX APIs. The parsed metadata (titles, captions, IDs) must be ingested into a distributed full-text search cluster (such as Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or Tantivy) with tens of terabytes of inverted indexes. Operating this pipeline demands significant cloud data engineering expertise and substantial infrastructure spend.
Discussion
12 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Internet Archive Wayback Machine, Common Crawl, archive.org
Concerns raised: YouTube playlists not reliably archived in existing services, No confirmation modal before playlist deletion, Wayback Machine redirects to first video instead of full playlist, Metadata availability gaps in archive sources
Feature requests: Backup/recovery for public YouTube playlists, Index non-deleted videos in addition to deleted ones, Reconstruct full playlist contents from archived snapshots
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 766 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #226 of 767 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 185 days after the earliest competitor.
- TubeHaus · hn · 2026-11-05 · 21 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Dynamic Map of YouTube Channels · hn · 2026-04-10 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- youtube-channels-video-scraper-resp · github · 2026-11-05 · 56 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Rundown · hn · 2026-06-20 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- RealTube · hn · 2026-06-24 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- mpv-youtube-search · github · 2026-09-23 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Nobody's Watching · ph · 2026-09-17 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- LLMNet · hn · 2026-01-25 · 29 upvotes · similarity 0.51
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