Last updated: April 15, 2026
YouTube Playlist Search is a Chrome extension that adds an in-page search bar to YouTube's playlist selection interfaces. It fetches your playlists directly from YouTube and lets you save videos to them.
This extension does not collect, store, transmit, or sell personal data to the extension developer or any third party. No analytics, tracking, or remote logging is performed. The extension developer does not operate a backend server and never receives any of your data.
No personally identifying information is ever read, stored, or transmitted. Your username, email, and profile photo are ignored by the extension.
The extension only communicates with youtube.com — the same server you are
already browsing. It does this by calling YouTube's internal "InnerTube" API
(https://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/*) as a same-origin request from the YouTube
tab you already have open. No requests are made to any other server, and no data is sent to
the extension developer.
The extension does not use OAuth, does not use
chrome.identity, and does not obtain, store, or transmit any
access tokens or refresh tokens.
Because InnerTube requests originate from a youtube.com page, your browser automatically
attaches your existing YouTube session cookie — the same way it does when you click
around YouTube normally. To satisfy InnerTube's authentication scheme, the extension reads the
SAPISID cookie from document.cookie on the current YouTube tab and
uses it to compute a short-lived SAPISIDHASH authentication header. The cookie
value and the derived hash are only ever sent back to youtube.com itself as part
of these same-origin API calls. They are never stored, logged, or transmitted anywhere else.
The extension reads the following "website content" from the YouTube pages you visit:
This data is indexed locally in your browser using MiniSearch so you can type-ahead search
your playlists. The index lives only in the tab's memory — the extension does not use
chrome.storage, localStorage, cookies, or any other persistent
storage. A short (6-hour) in-memory cache of your playlist list may be kept while the tab is
open; it is cleared when the tab closes.
All search, ranking, and filtering is performed locally in your browser.
The extension requests no Chrome API permissions (the
permissions array in manifest.json is empty). Its only site access
is a content script injected into https://www.youtube.com/* — the single
host it needs in order to place a search bar inside YouTube's save-to-playlist dialog and
playlist feed. It does not run on any other site, subdomain, or scheme. There is no
background service worker and no popup.
The extension bundles a local copy of MiniSearch for BM25-based ranking. MiniSearch runs entirely in your browser; no remote executable code is loaded at runtime, and no third-party SDKs are used.
If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted on this page with a new "Last updated" date.
Email: playlist@codyh.xyz