YouTube Now Lets You Filter Shorts Out of Search
Videos on the Internet have always been addictive, but short-form content is a whole different beast. No matter what platform you watch them on, these brief clips pull you in and don’t let go, and, before you know it, you’ve mindlessly scrolled through hours of videos, most of which you’ll never remember watching.
YouTube shorts are no exception. But unlike TikTok or Instagram, short content is not the main source of videos on the platform. YouTube, of course, primarily hosts long-form videos, and that’s the only reason many of us visit the site or app. Short films are just an afterthought, but an afterthought that YouTube is pushing hard. You can watch a specific video or check out new content from your subscriptions, but to do so you’ll need to get past the rows of “short films” all vying for your attention. God help your afternoon if you accidentally click on one.
If you like YouTube Shorts, ignore this. But for the rest of us who just want to find and watch standard videos on YouTube, there’s now a bit of a reprieve: as part of a broader update to search filters and content discovery, YouTube now lets users filter for Shorts in searches. The company presents this as a way to separate searches between either Short films or traditional videos, but you’ll never catch me looking specifically Shorts. What YouTube has done here, at least for users like me, is create a way to exclude Shorts from any particular search.
How to remove YouTube Shorts from search
To get started, open YouTube and search for something. You should now see a series of options at the top of the screen, including “Videos.” Choose it and you will reload the search with only long videos. Huzzah. You can also do the same thing from the top search filter settings: on the desktop, when the results appear, select “Filters” at the top right and then look for “Type” to the left of the “Search Filters” pop-up. On mobile, tap the three-dot icon, then choose “Search Filters.” On both platforms, you will find the “Videos” option here.
Unfortunately, this isn’t something you can set and forget: you’ll have to choose this option every time you search for something, which is really disappointing. That said, at least there is a few way to filter Shorts from a search, especially if those Shorts had an impact on your ability to find what you were looking for in the first place.
What do you think of it so far?
YouTube may never let us completely disable Shorts, but there are tools to get around them. You can choose to limit the number of short films you watch in a given day, although the guardrails aren’t necessarily strict. The company also lets you tell them to show you fewer Shorts on the homepage, but if that’s not enough, you can also install an extension to block Shorts from your feeds.
Other changes to YouTube filters
In addition to this new Shorts filter, YouTube has made some adjustments to the filters and sorting options. “Sort by” is now known as “Prioritize,” and while YouTube doesn’t say whether it changed the feature, it does say the menu “aims to maximize utility.” The company has also changed the sorting option from “View Count” to “Popularity”. The menu still takes into account the number of views, but also the watch duration, to sort videos in a search based on the algorithms’ supposed popularity.
Finally, YouTube removes the “Upload Date – Last Time” and “Sort by Rating” options from search. The company says you can always find the most recently uploaded videos from the “Upload Date” filters.
