YouTube is Updating its Search Filters

YouTube has announced updates to its search filters, which should make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for on the platform (via 9to5Google). The changes have been inspired by user feedback, and the YouTube team said that its updated filters should be “more effective and intuitive for everyone.”

A new ‘Shorts’ filter has been added to the ‘Type’ menu to search for the TikTok-style vertical videos. The YouTube team has also renamed some menus, reorganized filters, and removed two of them.

In the list of filters, the ‘Sort By’ option has been renamed to ‘Prioritize’. There are still two sorting options, ‘Relevance’ and ‘Popularity’ (the latter used to be named ‘View Count’). “Our systems assess a video’s view count and other relevance signals, such as watch time, to determine its popularity for that specific query,” the YouTube team explained.

As part of this update to search filters, the YouTube team is also removing two options, ‘Upload Date – Last Hour’ and ‘Sort by Rating.’ The team said that they were “not working as expected and had contributed to user complaints.”

It’s still possible to surface the most recent videos by using the ‘Upload date’ filter, however. Similarly, the ‘Popularity’ filter remains available to surface highly-viewed videos.