Internet videos have always been addicting, but short-form content is a whole other beast. Whatever platform you watch them on, these brief clips pull you in and don’t let go, and, before you know it, you’ve mindlessly scrolled through hours of videos, most of which you’ll never remember watching.
YouTube Shorts are no exception. But unlike TikTok or Instagram, short-form content is not the main source of videos on the platform. YouTube, of course, hosts long-form videos first and foremost, and is the sole reason why many of us visit the site or app. Shorts are just an afterthought, but an afterthought that YouTube pushes hard. You might hop on to watch a specific video, or check out new content from your subscriptions, but to do so, you’ll have to push past rows of “Shorts” all vying for your attention. God help your afternoon if you accidentally click on one.
If you like YouTube Shorts, please disregard. But for the rest of us that just want to find and watch standard videos on YouTube, there’s now some respite: As part of a larger update to search filters and content discovery, YouTube is now allowing users to filter out Shorts in searches. The company is pitching this as a way to separate searches between either Shorts or traditional videos, but you’ll never catch me searching specifically for Shorts. What YouTube has done here, at least for users like myself, is to create a way to exclude Shorts from any particular search.
How to remove YouTube Shorts from search
To start, open YouTube and search for something. You should now see a series of options along the top of the display, one of which is “Videos.” Choose it, and you’ll reload the search with only long-form videos. Huzzah. You can also do the same from the greater search filters settings: On desktop, when the results appear, select “Filters” in the top right then look for “Type” on the left of the “Search filters” pop-up window. On mobile, tap the three dots icon, then choose “Search filters.” On both platforms, you’ll find the “Videos” option here.
Unfortunately, this isn’t something you can set and forget: You’ll need to choose this option every time you search for something, which is definitely a bummer. That said, at least there’s some way to filter Shorts out of a search—especially if those Shorts were impacting your ability to find what you were looking for in the first place.
What do you think so far?
YouTube might not ever let us disable Shorts completely, but there are tools to get around them. You can choose to limit how many Shorts you watch in any given day—though the guardrails aren’t necessarily strict. The company also lets you tell them to show you fewer Shorts on the home page, but if that’s not enough, you can also install an extension to block Shorts from your feeds.
Other changes to YouTube filters
In addition to this new Shorts filter, YouTube made some adjustments to filters and sorting options. “Sort By” is now known as “Prioritize,” and while YouTube doesn’t say whether it changed the function, it does say the menu “aims to maximize utility.” The company also changed the “View count” sort option to “Popularity.” The menu still takes view count into consideration, but also watch time, to sort videos in a search by the algorithms’ assumed popularity.
Finally, YouTube is removing the “Upload Date – Last Hour” and “Sort by Rating” options from search. The company says you can still find videos uploaded most recently from the “Upload Date” filters.
