Hiding YouTube Shorts on Kagi

xJustxMegx

Can we get the option to block YouTube Shorts without blocking the whole YouTube domain?

This suggestion was made on Discord by jibre so all the credits to this person for the original idea.

Thibaultmol

Would be nice to have but probably not feasable atm.

there are several methods you can use to get like 80% of them out. but not 100% (at least, not in the timewindow till it has to show the results). So that means it'll be an unreliable feature and people will complain it doesn't work well

Youtube's api doesn't return if something is a short or not. iirc.
So the only things you can do is:

Some of the providers that are used to return a https://www.youtube.com/shorts/....url, that's an easy one to do
Some providers do give back a thumbnail that is vertical, so that also allows you to do it
But those aren't bullet proof, for ex: sometimes they bring back a thumbnail which is a 16:9 thumbnail that's just the vertical thumbnail with a blurry version of it in the background to fill a 16:9 image...

Atemu

Thibaultmol Would it be possible to at least get the 80%? That'd be much better than nothing at all. As long as it's transparently communicated to the user that this is a best-effort filter rather than a definite one, I think it'd be fine.

Another proxy that could be used to filter shorts would be, well, the length. I typically do not ever want to see a video that is <1 minute and I usually even want >4 minutes. The current user-exposed filters are not able to model any such filter. Improving those would go a long way towards enabling users to sort out the rubbish themselves.

I also had a look at what metadata YT reports in its HTML <head>. For shorts, it has the /shorts/ URL in the attribute of the following tags:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jknHjBSIk7c">
<link rel="alternate" type="application/json+oembed" …>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml+oembed" …>
<meta property="og:url" content="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jknHjBSIk7c">
<meta name="twitter:url" content="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jknHjBSIk7c">
<meta name="twitter:app:url:googleplay" content="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jknHjBSIk7c">

I have never worked with search indices but perhaps some of those metadata are available to you?