How to search YouTube comments by word or user

YouTube has no search box for a video’s comments. What works depends on whose comments you’re looking for: anyone’s on any video, the ones on your own channel, or the ones you wrote yourself.

On any video

1. Ctrl+F, after loading them all

The browser’s find (Ctrl+F, or Cmd+F on a Mac) only searches what’s on the page, and YouTube adds comments in batches as you scroll, with replies folded until you click “replies” under each one. On a video with a few hundred comments, that’s workable: choose Sort by > Newest first, scroll until no more load, then search. Replies you haven’t opened aren’t searched, and on a video with thousands of comments the page slows down long before the end. The YouTube app has no find at all.

Sift is the Chrome extension I make for this. Install it from the Chrome Web Store, and a Sift bar appears above the comments of any video on youtube.com:

Click Load comments. It loads every comment and, with Replies ticked, every reply.
Type in the search box. Every word you type has to be in the comment, in any order, ignoring case, and the matches are highlighted. Tick .* to search with a regular expression instead, for example colou?r for both spellings.
To find someone’s comments, type part of their name or @handle in Author. Other filters: minimum likes, comments or replies only, and only comments with timestamps, links or questions, or by the creator, hearted or pinned. Sort by most liked or most replied.
Click Open on a comment to see it in its thread on YouTube, or a timestamp in it to jump the video there.

Searching and filtering are free, and so is exporting what you found, up to 500 comments at a time, to CSV for Excel, JSON or text. Sift Pro ($7.99, paid once) exports any number. The other ways to get comments into a spreadsheet are in How to export YouTube comments to Excel or CSV.

3. A web tool, also on a phone

Extensions don’t run in the YouTube app or in most mobile browsers. On a phone, Hadzy does the same from a website: paste the video’s link, let it load the comments, and search them by keyword or author, with filters for date and likes. It’s free and needs no account.

On your own channel: YouTube Studio

In YouTube Studio, open Comments and type in the filter bar’s search. It finds keywords across all the comments on your videos, and, for the last 90 days, comments about a topic too (“questions about my microphone”). It can’t search by user. For that, and for comments on other channels’ videos, use one of the ways above.

Comments you wrote yourself