YouTube App Prepares to Add Additional Filter Options in Search Results

Google’s Android YouTube app has been lacking several of its desktop counterparts feature-set for some time (though the desktop version itself lacks from pretty major features), but it seems that Google is prepared to introduce some new filter options within the YouTube’s app’s search feature that will now allow you to filter by rating, relevance, and view count. These new features were pulled from strings found within the most recent YouTube app update, version 11.20.54. However, we haven’t seen these new filter options show up within the app itself, so it’s anyone’s guess when these new options will roll out to users.

Disclaimer: The evidence we dig up from the APK file of an app is not definitive. Google may choose to pull these features without any indication in a future release.

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YouTube Filter Options

Filter Options on Android

On the YouTube desktop website, you have a much wider variety of filter options available to you. On the Android version however, you only have the ability to filter by date, duration, content type, or quality. Digging into the APK file for the recent YouTube app update reveals the following strings:

<string name="by_rating_search">Rating</string>
<string name="by_relevance_search">Relevance</string>
<string name="by_view_count_search">View count</string>

These are all fairly straight-forward to decipher, but it’s nice to see that we’ll soon be getting additional search options within the YouTube app. Being able to filter videos by rating, relevance, and view count should open the door for users to take control of what kinds of videos they’re shown and ensure that only highly popular and/or well-liked videos are shown in your search results.

Before, the search options were woefully inadequate on mobile devices, which is major issue for Google seeing as according to their own official statistics over half of all views on YouTube come from mobile devices.

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That’s all we’ve found in the latest YouTube update. Stay tuned for future posts in our series when we investigate what’s new and what’s coming in Google’s Apps.

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