YouTube is tweaking its search filters to help users more effectively find the videos they’re looking for, without wading through irrelevant search results. The most notable change is a new Shorts video type option that lets users filter search results to only see short-form content.
According to a recent post on YouTube’s support forum, the search filters now include a dedicated “Shorts” option in the Type menu, which narrows results to short-form portrait videos. YouTube has also updated the Sort By menu in a bid to improve overall utility.
The Sort By menu has been renamed to “Prioritize,” and it now includes a “Popularity” option instead of “View count.” YouTube says this new option is designed to help users locate popular videos related to their search results by assessing the video’s view count and “other relevance signals, such as watch time, to determine its popularity for that specific query.”
YouTube has also removed some options from the filter menu to make it more intuitive and improve the overall search experience. These include the “Upload Date – Last Hour” and “Sort by Rating” filters, which the company says “were not working as expected and had contributed to user complaints.”
Finding the right video on YouTube just got easier
The Upload Date menu still includes four filters to help users sort results by the most recent uploads, namely Today, This week, This month, and This year. YouTube notes that the new Popularity filter will now pull double duty to help users explore popular, highly-viewed videos, effectively replacing the Sort by Rating option.
These filter changes are already live in the YouTube app for mobile and on the web. Users can access the new filters by clicking the Filters button in the top-right corner of the search results page on the web, or by tapping the three-dot menu button on the search results page on Android or iOS and selecting the Search filters option in the pop-up menu.