YouTube is finally giving people a way to tell its search results, “No, really, that’s not what I’m here for.” After years of mixing vertical Shorts and traditional long videos into the same chaotic results page, the platform is rolling out new filters that let you separate the two — or avoid Shorts altogether.​

If you spend any time on YouTube, you already know how messy search can feel. Type in the name of a game, a phone, or a how‑to, and the results page turns into a jumble of 15‑second clips, 10‑minute explainers, livestream VODs, and random uploads from years ago. That chaos only got louder as YouTube leaned hard into Shorts to compete with TikTok and Instagram Reels, pushing vertical quick hits alongside the longform videos that built the platform. For a lot of people, especially those searching for reviews, tutorials, news breakdowns, or deeper commentary, Shorts often feel like noise rather than signal.​

The big change is hidden in a place you’ve probably ignored for years: the search filters. YouTube is restructuring those filters so you can now explicitly tell it what kind of content you want. Under the Type section, you’ll see options that split formats more cleanly: one for “Videos,” which in testing surfaces only longform, horizontal videos; another for “Shorts,” which gives you that TikTok‑style vertical feed and nothing else. That means if you hate Shorts, you can finally filter them out of search with a couple of taps. If you love Shorts and want quick bursts of content without wading through 20‑minute uploads, you get that too.​

This may sound like a small tweak, but for power users it’s a pretty big deal. For years, YouTube search has been one of the platform’s most underrated features — and one of its most frustrating. Creators and viewers have grown used to ritualistic filter combos: sort by upload date, limit to “Today,” hunt for the latest news or fresh tutorials, or sort by view count to find the “definitive” guide that everyone else watched. Now YouTube is quietly rewriting those habits in a way that nudges people toward the videos its systems consider “best,” not necessarily the ones that are newest or most transparent in their metrics.​

Alongside the Shorts toggle, YouTube is also cleaning up, or depending on your perspective, dumbing down, some of its other filters. The company is removing “Upload Date – Last Hour” and “Sort by Rating,” saying both “were not working as expected” and drew user complaints. The Last Hour filter was niche but powerful: it let journalists, creators, and very online viewers catch brand‑new uploads as they hit the platform, whether that was breaking news, game trailers, leaks, or music drops. Sort by Rating was a relic from an earlier YouTube era, before likes and dislikes took over from star ratings, but it still gave users an explicit quality signal that didn’t depend entirely on views.​

Those options are gone. In their place, YouTube is pushing a more opinionated layer on top of search: a new “Popularity” filter that replaces the old “View count” sort. On the surface, it sounds similar — you hit Popularity and get what you expect to be the most‑watched videos. Under the hood, it’s more algorithmic. YouTube says its systems look at view count plus “other relevance signals,” like watch time, to decide what’s truly “popular” for that specific query. In plain language, the platform is reserving the right to override pure numbers in favor of whatever its models think people will stick around to watch.​

That subtle change matters if you were used to treating “View count” as the closest thing YouTube had to a raw, unfiltered leaderboard. When you sort by views, you’re choosing to trust the crowd. When you sort by “Popularity,” you’re trusting YouTube to interpret the crowd — and to weigh that interpretation against things like watch time and engagement, which conveniently align with the company’s own goals of maximizing session length and ad impressions. For users trying to audit information, researchers tracking virality, or anyone who just wants to see “what blew up” in clear numerical terms, that’s a meaningful shift.​

The “Sort by” menu itself is getting a rebrand, too. YouTube is renaming it to “Prioritize,” which is a very Silicon Valley way of saying “we’re going to quietly steer your behavior while pretending you’re still fully in control.” Under Prioritize, you’ll mainly see two choices: Relevance and Popularity. Relevance has always been there — that’s the default, algorithm‑driven mix that tries to guess what you want based on your history, the query, and broader patterns. Popularity is the new “best of what everyone else is watching” view, but again, filtered through YouTube’s understanding of what counts as “best.”​

The Upload Date options are being trimmed as well. You still get filters like “Today,” “This week,” “This month,” and “This year,” which are useful if you’re trying to avoid five‑year‑old tutorials or vintage leaked builds. But the ultra‑granular “Last Hour” window is gone, and so is the ability to combine that kind of recency filter with a strict “Sort by upload date” in the Prioritize menu. For anyone who relied on YouTube as a kind of live wire for breaking events, that feels like a real downgrade.​

Not surprisingly, the reaction has been mixed, and “mixed” is being generous. In the comments on YouTube’s support thread and across community discussions, a lot of users are happy about finally being able to isolate or block Shorts from search. Longform fans see it as a win for sanity: no more swiping past 12 vertical memes to find the in‑depth analysis they searched for. Shorts‑first creators, on the other hand, are treating the dedicated Shorts filter as a new discovery surface — a place where their content isn’t overshadowed by big‑budget, long-form channels.​

Where things get heated is everything around the recency and sorting changes. Many users say the removal of “Sort by Upload date” and “Last Hour” makes it harder to find the latest content, especially in fast‑moving niches like tech, politics, crypto, or live events. People who use YouTube as a real‑time search engine now see results that prioritize whatever the algorithm thinks is relevant or “popular,” which can easily favor older, entrenched videos over fresh uploads. Some are calling for a true recency‑based option to live inside the Prioritize menu — basically, “just show me the newest stuff, in order, and don’t get clever about it.”​

Zoom out and the story here is familiar: YouTube is tightening the feedback loop between what its algorithms want and what users are allowed to explicitly ask for. The Shorts vs. longform split is a genuinely useful bit of control, especially as Shorts continue to eat more space in recommendations, the homepage, and now search. But at the same time, everything that gave users more transparent sorting — raw view counts, strict chronological lists, hour‑level recency — is being softened into model‑driven “Popularity” and broader time buckets.​

That tension is not unique to YouTube. TikTok barely gives you any traditional search tools at all; you more or less surrender to the For You feed. Instagram’s search is designed around discovery, not precision. YouTube has historically sat closer to “search engine” than “slot machine,” which is why these changes sting for people who treated it like a video‑first Google. Now it’s inching toward the same pattern everybody else is following: give users just enough filter options to feel in control, while keeping the core ranking logic inside the black box.

For creators, the trade‑offs are just as real. A Shorts‑only search filter could help specialists in that format get more focused traffic and higher-intent viewers, which is gold if you’re building a channel around quick tips, memes, or news snippets. But losing clear “sort by views” and “sort by newest” knobs makes it harder to understand why one video takes off and another doesn’t, or how your content stacks up against others in your niche. Analytics dashboards can only show so much; transparent discovery mechanics are used to fill in the rest.​

For everyday viewers, the practical takeaway is simple. If you hate Shorts, hit the filter and shut them out of your search experience. If you love them, flip the same switch and enjoy a pure Shorts feed without scrubbing past 30‑minute explainers. Just be aware that when you’re looking for the newest upload on a fresh topic, or trying to track down the genuinely most‑viewed clip on a subject, the tools you used to rely on are now softer, fuzzier, and more aligned with YouTube’s idea of what you should watch next than your own.