Help With Youtube search

[Charlie Stallings]

Im trying to make my program search you tube and add the results to either a listbox or listview id like to use listview so i could add the videos info to the subitems (length,users name,views,rating ect)

if you can help please help me out

here is the data from inet

[LaVolpe]

Charlie, there are several threads on this forum for parsing HTML data. You may also want to visit the forum's CodeBank or UtilityBank. Maybe a generic routine exists there?

[dilettante]

YouTube Terms of Service

From Section 4. H:

H.You agree not to use or launch any automated system, including without limitation, "robots," "spiders," or "offline readers," that accesses the Service in a manner that sends more request messages to the YouTube servers in a given period of time than a human can reasonably produce in the same period by using a conventional on-line web browser. Notwithstanding the foregoing, YouTube grants the operators of public search engines permission to use spiders to copy materials from the site for the sole purpose of and solely to the extent necessary for creating publicly available searchable indices of the materials, but not caches or archives of such materials.

Sounds like another violation.

[Charlie Stallings]

dilettante you are far from wrong how am i violating anything when it clearly states that as long as im not automating anything im not "Violating" anything sir... now where did i say i wanted to automate anything i simply want to get the html data and load the seach results into a listbox .... the same thing as searching youtube with their search engine so you tell me sir what am i doing that a human cant do? or what am i violating? .... please understand what the person is doing before you jump to accusing people of stuff thank you ...

[dilettante]

Webscraping in any form is often prohibited by Terms of Service. Often it is about making sure the advertising that pays for the site is seen by every user, or it can be about keeping bandwidth and server load down to affordable levels. But the reasons don't matter, the Terms dictate what is or isn't permitted.

According to the YouTube TOS excerpt above your program would be fine if it just does searches at a pace that "a human can reasonably produce in the same period by using a conventional on-line web browser."

This means pausing at each pageful of results for example, not rapid-firing requests until all search results are retrieved, and certainly not doing repeated searches using variations in spelling or arrangements of search terms, or running through a list of searches.

[Charlie Stallings]

well dude lets see im sending the exact same url that youtube already uses and im not gathering anything from the search that doesnt come back with a normal search done via the youtube website all i want to do is simply search youtube and retrieve the results in a listbox .... the youtube website des the exact same thing except they dont use a listbox thats all .... im not "Rapid-firing" anything .... if you dont want to help thats fine but why accuse me of violating something when im clearly not ...

[si_the_geek]

It wasn't clear before your last post, because you hadn't mentioned it at all before that... but from what you have posted it seems that what you want to do is acceptable.

A tip for the future: when you are doing something that could potentially be interpreted as being against the Terms of a site (which is a category that this thread was definitely in before your last post), try make it clear in advance why it isn't - not only will you get less comments about it, but you will also get more help (because most people simply avoid the thread if they have any doubt).

Also note that while you don't like what dilettante has posted, his last post was just good advice given the limited details you had posted up until that point.


That's enough "off topic" posts - lets get back to focussing on solving the issue(s).

[Charlie Stallings]

i agree and i think it is going to be a little harder then i thought lol but thank you all for posting


and si i see where your coming from man, but at the same time not everyone that post should have to state hey im not doing anything illegal .... cause people shouldnt be doing anything that will violate the tos anyways

[si_the_geek]

and si i see where your coming from man, but at the same time not everyone that post should have to state hey im not doing anything illegal .... cause people shouldnt be doing anything that will violate the tos anyways

A shocking amount of people do illegal things or violate terms, and several people attempt to get help with it here - and understandably we don't like helping with things like that.

The vast majority of topics are unlikely to violate terms but subjects like this one frequently do (often accidentally), so it is only sensible for the people asking for help to make it clear that they aren't doing that, and if they don't for other people to check.

If you are doing an activity that is close to the limits (like this one), then it is best to make your intentions clear - if you don't (like in this case, where we didn't even know you weren't doing "rapid fire" until post #6) then it is very easy to assume that you either haven't bothered to check the terms, or you are intentionally doing something wrong. While only dilettante posted something that showed concerns, many other people thought it but avoided the "politics" by simply leaving the thread.

It is your choice to do something which is in an area where terms are highly likely to be violated, so on some level it is your choice to put the question in peoples minds. A little extra effort on your part to clarify the situation (especially after being prompted in post #3) would have eliminated the question, and therefore reduced/eliminated the hassle, and it would stop people from avoiding helping with your thread.

We don't know you personally and we aren't mind readers, so we can't tell what your code is going to do unless you tell us. Clarifying it takes a small amount of effort, but it is for your own benefit (even when terms etc aren't involved).