Search YouTube for a product review or a repair guide and you used to wade through a wall of 30-second vertical clips before finding a real video. YouTube finally added a search filter that hides Shorts, its TikTok-style short clips, so your results stop drowning in them. It only works in search, but search was the worst part.
For years there was no clean way to split the two formats apart, so a proper ten-minute tutorial got buried under one 47-second blip after another. YouTube has pushed Shorts hard since it rolled the format out worldwide in July 2021 to chase TikTok, and never gave people a built-in way to filter it out of search. A search filter is a real shift.
Where to find the filter
On the web, run a search, then tap the Filters button near the top of the results. A menu called Type holds the new Shorts option, next to the older Videos, Channels, Playlists, and Movies choices. Pick one and the results reshape around it.
On phones it is a little buried. Tap the three-dot overflow menu first, then open the search filters. Same Type menu, one extra step. If you do not see the Shorts option in either place yet, the update just has not reached your account.
Tubefilter on YouTube search filters
The renamed filters
YouTube also renamed two old filters. Sort By is now Prioritize, and View Count is now Popularity. Popularity is not a plain view counter. YouTube says it weighs raw views against watch time and how well a video matches what you searched for. A clip with 50 million views might not land on top if people did not stick around for it.
There is a quiet tweak to the length filter too. The old "Under 4 minutes" bucket is now "Under 3 minutes," which lines up with the 3-minute cap on Shorts, and YouTube added a fresh "3 to 20 minutes" range. The sliders now map more neatly onto the line between a Short and a real video.
9to5Google on YouTube search filter renames
Two filters got cut
Two options vanished in the same update. Upload Date's "Last Hour" setting is gone, and so is Sort by Rating. YouTube said neither worked the way people expected and both drew complaints, and pointed users to the remaining Upload Date filters and the new Popularity option.
Losing Sort by Rating is no big deal. It ranked videos roughly by how viewers rated them, and it has been basically dead since YouTube hid public dislike counts in November 2021. The Last Hour cut stings more. The leftover Upload Date filters still work (Today, This Week, This Month, This Year), but there is no hour-level option anymore, which will bug anyone chasing breaking news.
9to5Google on YouTube search filter renames
What this still misses
The new filter does not fix the deeper rot. Shorts still take over the home feed and the Subscriptions tab, and the filter only touches search. But search was the most broken part, so this is a real fix where it counts. It kills Shorts in search, nowhere else.
The rollout is gradual, so not everyone has it, and when 9to5Google covered the announcement in January 2026, the filters were not yet showing up on youtube.com or the apps. If you want Shorts gone across the whole site, the Unhook browser extension hides them everywhere. Don't count on YouTube shipping that itself. Shorts are too central to its TikTok fight to switch off easily.
