Search YouTube or within one channel

One credit per delivered page, including an empty page; zero on failure. An identical q, type, channel, and continuation retried with the same key within 60 seconds returns the same page for zero credits and consumes no additional daily page allowance. Other pages are not cached. Search has its own per-key daily allowance of 50 pages for free keys and 2,000 for paid keys, independent of cold transcript fetch counters; the approximate per-key rpm limit and daily credit cap also apply. Search never uses the YouTube Data API search.list endpoint. Resolving a channel handle is free and cached. Send opaque continuations unchanged with the same other parameters. A second daily allowance admits at most 150 attempts per free key or 6,000 per paid key (three times the page cap). Admitted attempts count before upstream work even if they later fail, but failures cost zero credits. Denied admission, in-flight duplicates and successful same-key replays add no attempt or page allowance. An in-flight identical request returns retryable 429 search_in_progress with Retry-After: 1; repeat the same key and parameters after waiting, and once delivery succeeds its page can be replayed free. A failed first request has no delivered page to replay. Malformed individual results are dropped while valid rows remain. Recommendation shelves such as Latest from and People also watched, including their nested results and continuation tokens, are excluded from organic results.