I was doodlebugging around and made a YouTube-based Google query builder. It slices a topical query five different ways and builds a list of keywords for each set of results. (Unique ones are a different color and marked with a star.)

Click on the keywords to add them to your Google query, the results of which will open in a new tab.

I want to explore with it more but it burns YouTube API credits like crazy. The YouTube API charges 100 units to run a search, and you only get 10,000 units a day. Since this program runs five searches to generate the keyword lists, it costs 500 units to run and I can only run it 20 times a day.

The YouTube API’s unit costs are one of the reasons I haven’t gotten more serious about making some of my YouTube search tools available online, especially the one that blends Wikipedia and YouTube together. Just when you’re getting some good searches together you run out of credits. It’s too bad, because with the various extra dimensions YouTube search has (searching by length of video, for example, or by video location) I can imagine all kinds of possibilities.