In 2019, we published a tutorial on how to manually recover deleted YouTube videos through the Wayback Machine. It involved a sequence of steps: copy the video ID, paste it into a special URL, follow the link, and hope that Archive.org had saved the file. The method worked, but it required knowledge of how web archives function and did not scale. Finding all deleted videos from a channel this way was impossible.

Today we are launching Archivarix Tube Search - a full-featured search engine that automates and extends this process to over 1.5 billion video records.

What It Is

Tube Search is a search engine for archived YouTube data. The service aggregates information from multiple public sources: the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive), Common Crawl, and various collected YouTube metadata datasets. When a video is deleted from YouTube, its page ceases to exist. But if a web archive managed to index that page before deletion, the video metadata is preserved: title, description, upload date, view count, thumbnails, subtitles.

Tube Search finds these archived copies and makes them accessible through a unified search interface.

What You Can Find

Channel search. Enter a channel URL, @handle, or Channel ID - the system will display all known videos for that channel, including deleted ones. Legacy URL formats are supported: /user/, /c/, /channel/, /profile?user=. This works even for channels that have been completely terminated.

Video lookup. Provide a specific video URL or its 11-character ID. The system will check all available archives and gather as much preserved information as possible.

Full-text search. Search by keywords across video titles and descriptions. Useful when you remember the content of a video but not the channel or exact title.

Subtitles. Access archived subtitles in over 240 languages. Download individual subtitle files in SRT format or batch download as a ZIP archive. For videos that are still available on YouTube, live subtitle retrieval is also supported.

Video files. The Wayback Machine occasionally preserves video files themselves. Tube Search automatically checks for archived copies and provides a link for viewing or downloading.

How Search Works

The Tube Search pipeline consists of 15 stages. When searching by channel, the system queries the Wayback Machine CDX API, the Common Crawl index, and the local metadata database in parallel. Results are streamed in real time via Server-Sent Events - you see videos as they are discovered, without waiting for the full scan to complete.

Each stage enriches the data: checking video status on YouTube (live or deleted), searching for thumbnail images, verifying video file availability in the archive, extracting subtitles. The entire process takes from a few seconds to a couple of minutes depending on the channel size.

Who It Is For

The service is useful for researchers, journalists, and anyone working with historical YouTube content. Typical use cases:

• Censorship research. Identify which videos were removed from a specific channel and when.
• Information recovery. Retrieve the title and description of a video that is no longer available.
• Subtitle work. Download archived subtitles of deleted videos for analysis or translation.
• Fact-checking. Find metadata for a video referenced in a publication that has since been deleted.

Pricing

Tube Search is free to use without registration. Free registration increases limits and unlocks additional features: subtitle downloads and search history.

Plus and MCP+API tiers with expanded limits (CSV export, bulk subtitle downloads, REST API, and an MCP server for AI assistants) will be available soon.

Interface and Languages

The interface is available in five languages: English, Russian, Spanish, German, and Portuguese. Each language has dedicated guides with step-by-step instructions and screenshots.

Try it: tube.archivarix.net

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