youtube

Search YouTube by hashtag

Searches YouTube for videos under a specific hashtag. Returns matching videos with view counts, channel info, and publish dates. DATES: the upstream sends only a date derived from a relative label such as "3 weeks ago" (or none), so by default every such row is joined to the per-video lookup for its exact publish second, at no extra credit (one lookup per page); send exact_dates=false to keep the estimate instead, marked by post.ext.published_precision. ROWS ARE UNEVEN, from the upstream: a large minority carry only id, URL, title and view count. The same free per-video lookup that fixes the dates gives those rows their channel id (post.ext.channel_id) and channel name (post.author.display_name), but post.content.duration_seconds, post.content.thumbnail_url, post.author.username and post.author.avatar_url stay null on them. With exact_dates=false no lookup runs, so the channel stays null too. That is a property of YouTube's hashtag shelf, not of your query. Send include=engagement to fill the duration in the same call, and include=engagement,channel for the handle and avatar: every row is joined to the per-video lookup, which supplies likes, comments, the duration, the exact publish time and the channel; include=channel adds the channel's subscriber count. Each costs 1 credit per distinct video or channel filled, at most 5 per page. TITLES: the free per-video lookup swaps YouTube's English machine-translated listing title for the creator's own; a title not swapped carries post.ext.title_maybe_translated: true (exact_dates=false skips the lookup).

get/youtube/search/hashtag

Request

  • Base URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1
  • URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/youtube/search/hashtag
  • Auth: API key in header x-api-key

Query parameters

hashtagstring required

Hashtag to search for without the # symbol

continuationTokenstring

Continuation token to get more videos. Get 'continuationToken' from previous response. Native upstream cursor param. Send the universal cursor instead: the API maps it to this name for you.

type'all' | 'shorts'

Search for all types of content or only shorts

includestring

Set to engagement, channel, or both (engagement,channel) to fill more of every row in this one call. engagement fills post.engagement.views, .likes and .comments, post.content.duration_seconds, post.ext.channel_id and post.author.display_name where the row lacks them, and replaces a date derived from a label such as "4 months ago" with the exact publish time (removing post.ext.published_precision). channel puts the channel's subscriber count on post.ext.author_followers (YouTube's own figure, which it rounds to three significant figures above 1,000) and fills the channel's post.author.display_name, .avatar_url and .username where missing. Send both to cover rows that arrive without a channel id: the video join supplies it and the channel join then uses it. Each join costs 1 credit per distinct video or channel it filled, and never more than 5 per 50; ids that could not be filled are refunded. Each join adds 0.2 to 0.7 seconds on a fresh page (one lookup per 50 ids, never more than 8 seconds). Read data.hydration for the rows, lookups, credits held and kept, and the time.

exact_dates'true' | 'false'

Exact publish dates are on by default and free. A row whose date the upstream derived from a relative label such as "4 months ago" (measured up to four months off) is joined to the per-video lookup for its exact publish second, at no extra credit: one lookup per page (two on a page past 50 rows, side by side), adding about 0.2 to 0.7 seconds (never more than 3). The same lookup swaps the listing title, often YouTube's English machine translation, for the creator's own, and computed.language follows it; a title not swapped carries post.ext.title_maybe_translated: true. Set to false to skip the lookup: rows then carry the supplier's date estimate (a day-granular or coarser label truncated to midnight UTC), marked by post.ext.published_precision and post.ext.published_label, and the listing title, marked by post.ext.title_maybe_translated. A row the lookup could not resolve keeps those values and markers, and _warnings carries exact_dates_partial (some rows) or exact_dates_unavailable (none); on channel/videos, whose dates are already exact, the warnings are original_titles_partial and original_titles_unavailable.

sincestring

Only rows published on or after this date: YYYY-MM-DD (midnight UTC) or an ISO 8601 timestamp. Rows older than it are left off each page. This list is not in date order, so the walk does not stop at the date: keep following next_cursor, and each page costs what a page costs even when every row on it is filtered out. A row with no date is kept. published_after, start_date, from_date, publish_time (yesterday, this-week, this-month, last-3-months, last-6-months) and max_age_days are accepted and applied as since.

untilstring

Only rows published on or before this date: YYYY-MM-DD (that whole UTC day is included) or an ISO 8601 timestamp. Newer rows are left off each page and the walk does not stop, so older pages follow. A row with no date is kept. published_before, end_date and to_date are accepted and applied as until.

min_viewsinteger

Keep only rows with at least this many views (post.engagement.views). A row whose view count is unknown is discarded, so every returned row meets the floor. Filtering runs on our side after each page is fetched, so every page walked is billed as usual; data.walk.discarded counts what was removed and why.

max_age_daysinteger

Keep only rows published within this many days (post.published_at), 1 to 3650. A row with no date is discarded. Filtering runs on our side after each page is fetched, so every page walked is billed as usual; data.walk.discarded counts what was removed and why.

sort_rows'views'

views: return the kept rows ordered by view count, highest first, across every page walked. Rows without a view count go last.

max_pagesinteger

1 to 5 (default 1). Walk up to this many pages in one call and return the rows from all of them (after any filter). Each page walked is billed exactly as one call to this endpoint (a cached page is free) and counts against your rate limit. The walk stops early at the last page, or when the request's time budget runs low; data.walk.stopped says why (end, max_pages, time_budget, page_error) and data.next_cursor continues from where it stopped.

seenstring

An id you choose (1 to 64 letters, digits, ., _ or -). Rows your account already received under the same seen id are removed from the page, and the page price falls with the share of repeats: page credits x new rows / rows on the page, rounded up, so a page of nothing but repeats is free. Only the page's own price is discounted: credits for joined data (include=) are charged only for rows you have not received, and are never discounted. The memory lasts 24 hours from the last call that used the id, holds row ids only, and is private to your account. Use one id across a set of related searches; data.walk.repeats counts what was removed.

cursorstring

Universal pagination cursor. Send pagination.next_cursor from the previous response back verbatim: the API maps it to this endpoint's native continuationToken (cursor style). You never construct, decode, or look up a cursor. Omit it for page 1.

Headers

Cache-Controlstring

Send no-cache to bypass the response cache and force a live fetch. Billed at the normal endpoint cost; the fresh result is written back to cache for the next caller. Only the no-cache directive triggers this. See the Response Schema guide for details.

Idempotency-Keystring

Optional UUID that makes the request safely retriable. The key is reserved atomically per account before billing. A concurrent retry receives 409 IDEMPOTENCY_IN_PROGRESS with a Retry-After of 1 second while the original is young, growing to a quarter of the time it has been running (at most 30); a crashed reservation expires after 5 minutes. A replay keeps the cached payload immutable except for billing metadata: credits_used becomes 0, idempotent_replay becomes true, and credits_remaining is refreshed to the current balance. A known current balance appears in both the body and X-Credits-Remaining header; no balance row resolves to 0. On a transient lookup failure, body credits_remaining is null and X-Credits-Remaining is omitted. Completed outcomes expire after 24 hours. If the claim store is unavailable, the request fails closed before billing. GET endpoints do not combine idempotent replay with Server-Sent Events: use Accept: application/json when sending this header. The unsupported key-plus-SSE combination is rejected before billing.

Response

Successful response

successboolean required

Whether the request succeeded

platformstring required

Platform name

endpointstring required

API endpoint path

credits_usedinteger required

Number of credits consumed

credits_remaininginteger nullable required

Current account balance, or null when this response could not establish one. Free cache hits always return null because they do not establish an authoritative post-request balance. An idempotency replay also returns null when its current-balance lookup fails. It is never a fabricated zero, so a zero here means the account really is empty. The authoritative reading is the one on a billed response, which comes straight from the deduction.

request_idstring required

Unique request identifier for support

cachedboolean required

Whether the response was served from cache

idempotent_replayboolean

True only when this response is an idempotency replay

Example response

{
  "success": true,
  "platform": "youtube",
  "endpoint": "/v1/youtube/search/hashtag",
  "credits_used": 1,
  "credits_remaining": 4999,
  "request_id": "req-abc123",
  "idempotent_replay": true,
  "meta": {
    "hint": {
      "code": "search_multi",
      "message": "You searched \"matcha\" on 3 platforms one call at a time; /v1/search/multi returns each platform's own search rows in one call at the same price per platform, and a platform with no rows is not charged.",
      "method": "GET",
      "path": "/v1/search/multi?query=matcha&platforms=instagram,tiktok,youtube"
    }
  },
  "pagination": {
    "next_cursor": "sc.eyJ2IjoyLCJjIjoiMiIsInAiOiJwYWdlIn0",
    "has_more": true,
    "page_size": 30,
    "stopped_at": "known_id"
  }
}

Changes

No recorded changes to this operation across all 1 revision of this API.