How to Find (and play) Videos Removed from YouTube

Approximately 2 months ago, a colleague & fan of Petey Vid https://www.peteyvid.com mentioned to us they were able to locate a video they created in high school (quite some time ago) on the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine) as a playable YouTube video.

Though we were aware that the Internet Archive did indeed save archived copies of websites, audio, video and other content this realization from our colleague got us thinking... what about videos removed or deleted from video platforms in some cases MANY years ago...

It was at this point we decided to look into the ability for Petey Vid to.. believe this.. search for & find videos removed & deleted from YouTube on the Internet Archive.

Using some creative means, we were able to catalog all the YouTube video IDs on the Internet Archive (approximately 180 million) and then figure out which were no longer in existence on YouTube. Our figures indicate (from this set) approximately 25 million videos have either been removed or deleted from YouTube between 2013 and 2018.

We have started to migrate these video listings into Petey Vid so that users can get these links available to them with normal queries, and have about 50,000 videos already processed and available.

Additionally, we have created a new search syntax as well to get straight to these type of results. When searching in Petey Vid, simply add +ytarchived to your search and it will limit results only to videos removed from YouTube.

For example, you can do a search for : documentary +ytarchived

Happy holidays!

-Petey