To find a YouTube video from a quote, put the most distinctive few words of it in quotation marks and run a web search with "youtube" added. Then try the same fragment in YouTube's own search box. This finds the video when the line has been written down somewhere, such as a title, a description, a comment or a post that quotes it. If the words were only ever spoken, try a site that searches the captions of public YouTube videos, or ask a community that identifies clips. When all of these come up empty, the usual reason is that the quote is remembered a little wrong.
Searching YouTube by quote
YouTube's search box looks for videos, and it weighs titles, descriptions and similar text much more heavily than anything said in the audio. A quote that became famous often ends up in a title ("the 'we'll fix it in post' interview") or in the top comments, so a quoted search inside YouTube is worth one try. If the results are crowded, filtering by upload date or video length can help when you remember roughly when you saw it or how long it ran.
A general web search usually does better, because it also reaches comments, forums, transcripts posted on other sites and articles that embed the video. Put the fragment in quotation marks so the engine matches the exact words, and add a word you're sure of, like the speaker's name or the topic.
Searching for a YouTube video using a quote from the audio
When nobody has written the line down, the only text version of it is the caption track. Caption-search websites index the subtitles of public videos and return matches with timestamps, which gets you both the video and the moment. Two limits apply. They only cover videos they have crawled, and they only see videos that have captions. Auto-generated captions also misspell names and slang, so the line can be in the index under a spelling you wouldn't think to type.
Communities that identify clips are the other option. A short post with the quote, roughly when you saw it and what kind of video it was (a podcast, a lecture, a gaming stream) often gets an answer faster than any search. If the line is from a film or a TV show uploaded to YouTube, the problem is mostly the same as finding which movie a line comes from, and quote databases will beat caption search.
Fixing a half-remembered quote
Most failed searches are memory problems. People tend to remember a line's meaning and rebuild its wording, so the exact-phrase search misses by one word. Some fixes:
- Search for the shortest unusual part of the quote. Leave out filler words like "basically" or "you know."
- Try several versions of the words you're least sure about, and drop the quotation marks around those.
- Write numbers both ways. "Ninety percent" and "90%" are different strings to a caption index.
- Search for what the line was about, without quotation marks, and scan the results for a speaker you recognize.
When the quote is from your own videos
The problem changes if the quote comes from recordings you hold, such as your own uploads, a show's back catalog or an archive of talks. You have the files, so you don't depend on what search engines happened to index. The plain version is to export or create transcripts and search them as text. That works for exact wording but stops working once the archive grows large and the transcripts sit in places that are hard to search together. Organizing an archive of recorded episodes goes through the groundwork for that.
The other version is to upload the recordings to a tool that indexes them once and then search by describing the line, which helps when you remember the kind of thing that was said better than the words. Vivu works this way. In a recording of a panel discussion, a search for "a short punchy sentence containing a surprising statistic" came back as short, openable time ranges, each with a one-line reason that restates the line. That reason is a paraphrase, numbers included, so you still need to listen to the clip before quoting it word for word. One of the matches came from an audience question rather than a panelist, which is easy to miss if you go by the reasons alone.
Which route fits
If the quote is from someone else's public video, you're working with text other people have published: web search, caption-search sites and the people who might remember it. Tools you set up yourself won't help, because you don't have the files. If the quote is from your own recordings, the question is whether you know the exact words. If you do, a transcript search is enough. If you only remember the idea, you need something that searches by meaning.
FAQ
Why can't I find a YouTube video even though I know the quote?
Most likely the line exists only in the audio and nobody has written it down where a search engine can see it. YouTube search mostly matches titles and descriptions, and caption-search sites only cover the public videos they have crawled. It is also common to remember a quote one word off, and that is enough to break an exact-phrase search.
Can I find a YouTube video from a quote if the video was deleted or made private?
Usually not through YouTube, since removed and private videos drop out of its search. Your best chances are reuploads by other channels, web archives that saved the page, and comments or posts elsewhere that quoted the line and linked the original.
How do I find where a quote is said once I've found the video?
Open the video on a computer, click "Show transcript" under the description, and use Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) to search the transcript panel. Clicking the matching line jumps the player to that point. This needs the video to have captions, and auto captions may spell the words differently from how you'd write them.
Is there an app that identifies a YouTube video from a quote, like song recognition?
There is no widely used equivalent for speech in YouTube videos. Song recognition matches audio against a catalog of fingerprints, and nothing comparable covers spoken lines across YouTube. Caption-search websites come closest, and they only work for public videos with captions that they have indexed.