Videos on the internet have always been addicting, but the rise of short-form content has introduced a different kind of friction for those who prefer the traditional viewing experience.
For many, YouTube remains the premier destination for long-form videos, yet the platform’s aggressive push into Shorts often makes navigating the site feel like an obstacle course. Users might log on to watch a specific documentary or a new upload from a favorite subscription, only to find themselves forced to push past rows of vertical clips vying for their attention.
Until recently, there was no native way to separate these two distinct worlds, often leading to a cluttered search feed where the content users actually wanted was buried under a mountain of sixty-second loops.
In a minor but meaningful overhaul, YouTube is finally addressing this frustration by introducing more granular control over its search filters.
And the most significant addition is a dedicated "Shorts" filter, which allows users to explicitly choose between short-form and traditional video content.
By selecting the "Videos" option within the search filters, users can now effectively scrub Shorts from their results, ensuring that only long-form content appears.
While this isn't a "set and forget" permanent toggle, and that users still have to select the filter for each new search, the update certainly it provides a much-needed reprieve for those who find the vertical video format more distracting than engaging.
Beyond the separation of video formats, the platform has also rebranded and refined several of its core discovery tools to better reflect how its algorithms actually work.
The familiar "Sort By" menu has been renamed "Prioritize," a change YouTube claims is more intuitive for users looking to weigh specific criteria.
Within this menu, "View Count" has been replaced by a "Popularity" filter. Unlike the old system, which relied strictly on raw numbers, the Popularity metric now factors in a broader range of signals, including watch time and relevance, to surface videos that are genuinely capturing the audience's attention rather than just those with the highest click-through rates.
Not all of the changes involve additions, as YouTube is also cleaning house by removing several underperforming options.
The "Upload Date - Last Hour" filter and the "Sort by Rating" feature have both been axed, with the company admitting these tools were not working as expected and were the source of frequent user complaints.
Users looking for the latest uploads will now have to rely on the broader "Today" filter, while the "Popularity" sort is intended to act as a more reliable replacement for the outdated rating system.
These removals are part of a broader effort to simplify the interface and reduce the clutter that has accumulated over years of incremental updates.
The timing of this update reflects a maturing landscape where the novelty of short-form content is meeting the reality of user fatigue.
By acknowledging that long-form and short-form audiences often have different intents, YouTube is attempting a difficult balancing act: promoting its newest format without alienating its core base of traditional viewers.
In all, these changes signal a shift toward a more customizable search experience.
For those who have spent years dodging the "Shorts" shelf, these new tools offer the first real sense of agency in how they discover content on the world’s largest video platform.
To use these filters, users can find them in the "Filters" button the YouTube on desktop, or under the three-dot menu on mobile after performing a search.