YouTube will let you exclude Shorts from search results

YouTube today introduced new filters to its advanced search tools. Perhaps the most interesting change is that short films are now listed as a content type, so videos three minutes or less may be excluded from your search results.

This is a welcome update for all of us who are looking for a detailed explainer only to wade through dozens of ten-second clips before finding anything that comes close to our goal. Especially with the addition of even more AI last year thanks to the Google Veo 3 engine, an option to exclude Shorts may seem even more appealing.

Other updates include a pair of renamed features in advanced search. The “Sort by” menu will now be called “Prioritize”. Likewise, the “View Count” option has been renamed “Popularity”; This will allow YouTube’s algorithms to consider other metrics such as watch time to gauge how well other users are engaging with a particular video. Two old filter options have also been removed; there will no longer be a choice to search for “Download Date – Last Time” and “Sort by Rating”.