Youtube RAG search with frontend using Apify, Qdrant and AI

Ever wanted to build your own RAG search over Youtube videos? Well, now you can! This n8n template shows how you can build a very capable Youtube search engine powered by Apify, Qdrant and your LLM of choice to quickly and efficiently browse over many videos for research.

I originally started to template to ask questions on the "n8n @ scale office-hours" livestream videos but then extended it to include the latest videos on the official channel.

Check out a demo here: https://jimleuk.app.n8n.cloud/webhook/n8n_videos

How it works

• Stage 1 is to collect the Youtube video transcripts and push them into a vector database. For this, I've used Apify to scrape Youtube and Qdrant to store the embeddings.
• Transcripts are broken down into smaller chunks and carefully tagged with metadata to assist in later search and filtering.
• Stage 2 is to build a web frontend for the user to query the vectorised transcripts. I'm using a webhook to serve a simple web app and API to dynamically fetch the results.
• When searching for a video, I've opted to use Qdrant's search groups API which in this use-case, performs better as it returns a wider range of videos results.
• In the web frontend, when the user clicks on the results, the matching Youtube video plays in an embedded video player.

How to use

• Once credentials are all set, first run steps 1 - 3 to populate your vector store.
• Next, set the workflow to active to expose the web frontend. Visit the webhook URL in your browser to use it.
• If only for personal use, you may want to remove the rate limiting mechanism in step 4.

Requirements

• Apify for Youtube Channel and Video Scraping
• Qdrant for Vector store
• OpenAI for LLM and Embeddings

Customising the template

• Not interested in official n8n videos? Swap to a different channel - this template will work on many as long as videos are not private or set to prevent embeds.
• Technically any vector store should work but may not have the same grouping API. Use the simple vector store node and revert back to basic searching instead.