When you fire up YouTube, what types of videos do you look for? A deep dive on a brand-new video game? A clip from your favorite movie from 15 years ago? Maybe a cute animation about nuclear war? That’s all well and good, but why aren’t you searching the right way for your videos—you know, by color?
YouTube now lets you sort your home page by color, so only videos predominately featuring the chosen hue will appear. The company doesn’t offer you a color wheel to choose from, either. Instead, we get three colors: red, green, and blue. They aren’t promoting the feature much, either. Unless you get a pop-up advertising the feature, you’ll probably miss it entirely. I initially came across it from this tweet:
Tweet may have been deleted
It’s not obvious how to find these options, but it’s not hard to do, either. To start, open the YouTube app (this won’t work on desktop), then scroll left all the way on the sorting options at the top of the screen. Once you reach the end of this row, you’ll find your three color options: red, blue, and green. Tap on one, and YouTube will refresh the feed, displaying videos whose thumbnails mostly represent the color you’ve picked.
It isn’t perfect, and it’s funny to see which videos the algorithm decides to show you. When I choose green, I got videos like this one from DankPods, because the iPad they use in every video has a green case on it. When I choose red, I got this video from One Bite Pizza Reviews, because of the “red” pizza in the thumbnail. When I picked blue, I got this video from exurb1a, which was funny, because the thumbnail displays a lot of colors other than blue. (Admittedly, there’s more blue than green or red.)
Do I see myself using this feature every day? Probably not. But it’s kind of a fun way to find new videos depending on your current mood. “Man, I’m really feeling like a green video today, you know?”