What it does
Archivarix Tube Search is a website for finding YouTube videos that are no longer available. It searches the Wayback Machine, Common Crawl and other web archives to recover video metadata, thumbnails, subtitles and links to archived video files. The site says it has indexed over 4 billion YouTube video records since 2005. You can search by channel URL or handle to see a channel's archived videos with their original titles, descriptions, view counts and thumbnails, or look up a single video by URL or its 11-character ID. Full-text search covers titles, descriptions and subtitle transcripts, with quotes for exact phrases, a minus sign to exclude words and OR for alternatives. Subtitles recovered from caption archives and Wayback Machine snapshots can be downloaded in SRT format, and the site checks whether the video file itself has been preserved on Archive.org. Its guide also includes sections on subtitles and AI transcripts.
Capabilities
- Search by YouTube channel URL or handle
- Look up a video by URL or 11-character ID
- Full-text search across titles, descriptions and subtitle transcripts
- Download recovered subtitles in SRT format
- Check whether the video file survives in Archive.org
When to use it
- Finding what a deleted or removed YouTube channel once posted
- Recovering subtitles from a video that is no longer online
- Checking whether a removed video was archived and can still be watched
