Like a lot of us during the pandemic lockdown, Shubham Bose found himself consuming more YouTube content than ever before. That’s when he started to notice all the unwanted oddities appearing in his YouTube search results — irrelevant suggested videos, shorts, playlists, etc. Shubham wanted a cleaner, more focused search experience, so he decided to do something about it. He built YouTube Search Fixer. The extension streamlines YouTube search results in a slew of customizable ways, like removing “For you,” “People also search for,” “Related to your search,” and so on. You can also remove entire types of content like shorts, live streams, auto-generated mixes, and more.
The extension makes it easy to customize YouTube to suit you.
Early versions of the extension were less customizable and removed most types of suggested search results by default, but over time Shubham learned that different users want different things in their search results. “I realized the line between ‘helpful’ and ‘distracting’ is very subjective,” explains Shubham. “What one person finds useful, another might not. Ultimately, it’s up to the user to decide what works best for them. That’s why I decided to give users granular control using an Options page. Now people can go about hiding elements they find distracting while keeping those they deem helpful. It’s all about striking that personal balance.”
Despite YouTube Search Fixer’s current wealth of customization options (a cool new feature automatically redirects Shorts to their normal length versions), Shubham plans to expand his extension’s feature set. He’s considering keyword highlighting and denylist options, which would give users extreme control over search filtering.
More than solving what he felt was a problem with YouTube’s default search results, Shubham was motivated to build his extension as a “way of giving back to a community I deeply appreciate… I’ve used Firefox since I was in high school. Like countless others, I’ve benefited greatly from the ever helpful MDN Web Docs and the incredible add-ons ecosystem Mozilla hosts and helps thrive. They offer nice developer tools and cultivate a helpful and welcoming community. So making this was my tiny way of giving back and saying ‘thank you’.”
When he’s not writing extensions that improve the world’s most popular video streaming site, Shubham enjoys photographing his home garden in Lucknow, India. “It isn’t just a hobby,” he explains. “Experimenting with light, composition and color has helped me focus on visual aesthetics (in software development). Now, I actively pay attention to little details when I create visually appealing and user-friendly interfaces.”
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