About the Geo Search Tool

This reference implementation was developed as a simple model of how News organizations could use Google APIs to help find citizen journalism on YouTube. It uses YouTube and Google APIs to generate location based search results which are stack ranked by upload time. The code is open-source so that others can build from it. If you do use it to find videos for your stories, please give attribution to the uploader and YouTube in the aired footage. Thanks!

Getting Started

Try searching on a location you are interested with a wide location radius (e.g. 100km). If this gives too many irrelevant results then filter down by timestamp, radius or by adding keywords to the top search box (e.g. fire, explosion, tornado).

Helpful Hints

Turn Auto Translate On for Your Browser - If you are using Chrome then follow the instructions to turn on translation on for your browser. Auto-translate will prompt you to auto-translate a page if it detects foreign text.
Use Google Translate when entering keywords - In areas where you do not know the base language, use Google Translate to translate keywords and then enter those into the keyword field. Note for location you will not need to do this as the geo-encoder is just looking up latitude and longitude coordinates (and is not itself a search term).
Try Reverse Image Search - To assist with validation click the "reverse image search" link to display what image search results are returned based on the thumbnail image.
Non location-based searches - If the search results are sparse or non-existent then this is probably because there are no geo-tagged videos for that location and radius. Instead, append the location to the keywords in the keyword box and leave the location and location radius blank, this will search across all videos (not just geo-tagged ones) but won't provide map results.

More Details

Search - Search is conducted via YouTube APIs. Search results are stack ranked by publish date (latest first). When a location is entered in the location field, we conduct a geo search which only applies to videos that have geo-tagging turned on. Likewise, we apply a couple filters to help remove non-News results (e.g. auto reviews).
Keywords - The keyword filter can be helpful when you receive too many diverse results. By adding keywords to a geo location search you can narrow the results to just that topic. Consequently using words "fire, explosion, drone, tornado" can help focus results on what you are interested in.
Location - The location search box geo-codes text entries into latitude and longitude coordinates and then searches using the YouTube APIs. Please note that only a small percentage of videos are geo-tagged and this search will only query those videos. The geo-tag coordinates are generally the upload location, so the actual location of where the video was shot may differ.
Creative Commons Only Results - This filter allows you to surface videos currently with a creative commons liscense. To learn more about the Creative Common liscense here.
Embeddable Only Results - This filter will only display videos that are enabled to be embedded. Learn more here
Live Only Results - This filter will only display live streams. Learn more here

Known Issues

Overlapping Markers - If two videos have the same coordinates only one map marker will show (so not all map markers will appear on the map).

Happy Searching!