For eLearners, YouTube has no way to search playlists while saving and organizing videos

I love YouTube. I actually think it’s one of the single most influential pieces of technology that have graced my generation and beyond. The ability for creators worldwide to share their knowledge and wisdom on life and their industry has literally transformed my career path and shaped my existence. No, that’s not an understatement.

Needless to say, I collect a lot of videos, and unfortunately, the Watch later playlist on YouTube caps you out at 5,000 videos, and once you’re full up, you can’t save anything further this way. You may be asking yourself why I have 5,000 watch later items and why I haven’t watched them! YouTube is full of great content every second of every day, with an unfathomable amount being added even as I type this, and as a parent, it’s hard to get time to catch up.

I’ve actually begun parsing out my Watch later items into separate playlists based on the video topic or a goal like “learn guitar”, “3D modeling”, and more, and I’ve even gone so far as to make my playlists collaborative between my separate work and home persona accounts. This helps me avoid hitting the 5,000 limit for the primary quick list, and also to focus my time watching on specific areas instead of shuffling Watch later and getting something random. As a side note, Google just needs to integrate Playlists into Google Collections, but that’s a topic for another day.

Sadly, I’ve run into another issue that I don’t think many people have, so I forgive Google for not addressing it. Sometimes, I like to revisit videos for later or keep them forever as reference or for sharing, but once I created a bunch of playlists, I realized that adding videos from my feed into them was not as straightforward because there’s no freaking search bar!

On desktop, this isn’t so much of an issue as you can just press “Ctrl + F” on your keyboard and find the name of the playlist using Chrome’s browser-wide search function, but on mobile, there’s literally no way to find your preferred save location. Instead, you just have to scroll through them. Now, there is some saving grace – any playlist you’ve recently added to will appear at the top. This means that if you find yourself adding videos to the same three to four playlists daily, there’s no hunting or pecking.

I understand that I’m an edge case, but I would love if Google added a playlist search function to YouTube on desktop and mobile to make things easier on hoarders like me. As I said before, YouTube is a great source of education for my generation (not to be replaced by great books and other resources, but used alongside them), and I think that because it’s being used for more than just entertainment, its features should become more powerful to reflect that.