bellingcat / bellingcat/toolkit

Tool suggestion: Archivarix Tube Search

Open Beginner friendly
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Description

**Tool suggestion: Archivarix Tube Search** — https://tube.archivarix.net/

Disclosure: I'm the developer. Below is a draft entry following the toolkit
structure, feel free to use, edit, or discard any of it.

## URL
https://tube.archivarix.net/

## Description
A search engine for deleted, removed and unavailable YouTube videos, built on
web archives (Wayback Machine, Common Crawl, the 2019 YouTube metadata dump).
It indexes 1.5B+ video records since 2005. Researchers can list all known
videos of a channel (including deleted ones, via URL, @handle or legacy
/user/ and /c/ formats), run full-text search across titles, descriptions and
subtitle transcripts, and recover metadata of deleted videos: original title,
description, upload date, view counts and thumbnails. Subtitles can be
downloaded as SRT (240+ languages), including for deleted videos when a
caption track was archived. Each result links to the underlying archive
snapshots, which can be cited as evidence.

## Cost
Free (core search and single downloads, no registration required). A free
account raises limits; paid plans add bulk export, API and MCP access.

## Level of difficulty
Beginner. Works in the browser: paste a video URL, channel link or keywords.

## Requirements
None for basic use. Free account for higher limits.

## Limitations
- Coverage depends on whether a video was archived before deletion; obscure
or short-lived videos may have no records.
- Usually recovers metadata, thumbnails and subtitles rather than the
playable video file (archived files are surfaced when they exist).
- Recently deleted videos may not appear in the index immediately.
- AI-generated transcripts may contain recognition errors.

## Ethical Considerations
- Some videos are deleted for legitimate reasons (privacy, consent, safety
of persons shown); consider potential harm before republishing recovered
content, and minimise exposure of private individuals.
- Archived metadata can reflect an intermediate state of a video (e.g. an
older title); verify against the linked archive snapshots before citing.

## Guide
Step-by-step guides: https://tube.archivarix.net/guide/deleted-videos and
https://tube.archivarix.net/guide/subtitles

## Tool provider
Archivarix (archivarix.com), a web-archiving and website restoration service
running since 2017. Based in Prague, Czech Republic.

## Advertising Trackers
No advertising trackers; no third-party ads on the site.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reviewing the toolkit's existing entry structure and the draft content in this issue, then follow the repository's contribution conventions. Done means a reviewed Archivarix Tube Search entry is added with the relevant links, description, limitations, ethical considerations, and advertising-tracker information.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
68/100

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