🔎 YouTube Microservice (no API key)

Same /search contract as youtube-service/, backed by the youtube-search-api npm package instead of the official Data API.

Status

● no API key required, no quota

Example request

GET /search?q=eraser&maxResults=5

q required, min 3 characters. maxResults optional, default 12, capped at 50. No year/country filters here - that's specific to the official-API version.

Excluded channels

Set via the EXCLUDE_AUTHOR env var (comma-separated) - matching channels are dropped from every search result entirely.

sing king
atomic
gma news
gma public affairs

Max duration

Set via the MAX_DURATION_MINUTES env var - currently 20 minutes. Videos longer than this are dropped from every search result entirely; an unparseable duration (missing, live, etc) is kept rather than assumed too long.

Trade-offs vs youtube-service/

No API key to configure, no per-key monthly limit to hit.
Unofficial scraper (not a supported Google API) - can break if YouTube changes its page structure.
description is always empty - not exposed by search-result scraping.
No built-in file cache here - that layer lives in server/server.js, in front of whichever of these two services it's pointed at.