Webscrape Youtube with Yahoo Pipes

This is the first part of a multi step tutorial on how to webscape Youtube using Yahoo pipes.
By the end of this series you will have an RSS feed of different videos all webscraped from different Youtube queries.
I will then show you how to filter out videos below a certain number of views or below a certain ranking.
In the final stage of this series I will show how to add this RSS feed to wordpress to create a constantly updating automated blog full of quality content.

A quick example
Dubstep is a genre of music. I want to search Youtube for Dubstep music and all its sub genres.

Lets begin

1. Select the “URL Builder” module from the URL section of modules.

2. URL Builder module
- “BASE” you want to copy and paste the following line in it.

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/videos

-Query parametres (you need 4 boxes)
Box 1 – “q” – “Dubstep”    This defines the search we are doing on youtube
Box 2 – “client” – ytapi-youtube-search
Box 3 – “alt” – “rss”
Box 4 – “v” – “2″

Check out the screenshot below

3. You can repeat this process adding more “URL builder modules” and changing the “q” box.  In this example I have two queries for youtube.  ”dubstep” and “heavy dubstep”.

4. For each “URL builder” module you need to attach a “fetch data” module
In “path to item list” put in “channel.item”
I don’t know why but this seems to create a readable RSS format that you should be familiar with

5.  Choose the “Union” module and attach all your “fetch data” modules to it. Remember if you have many many queries you can keep adding “union modules”.

6. I would recommend using the “sort” module and sort by item.y:published.
Sorting RSS feeds by date using Yahoo Pipes

7. Connect up your pipe to the output and run the pipe. You should have a list from Youtube with one or more queries all combined into one.

In the next part of this series I will show you how to filter out the low ranking or low viewed videos which should help increase the relevance of your live RSS feed.