RecLog: Find Lost YouTube Homepage Videos, Search Recommendation Thumbnails

Never lose a YouTube video again. RecLog saves your recommendations so you can search them, even by text inside thumbnails.

Ever see an interesting video on your YouTube home page, refresh the tab, and lose it forever? YouTube's own search can't save you: it only finds videos by title, and creators put the actual hook in the thumbnail image, not the title. Type what you saw into YouTube search and you get nothing. RecLog is a lightweight Chrome extension that quietly keeps a searchable history of every video YouTube recommends to you (your home feed, sidebar, and end screens), even the ones you never clicked. Then when you lose something, you find it in seconds. HOW IT WORKS - Automatic logging. Every recommendation you scroll past is indexed in the background. Nothing to set up, nothing to click. - Thumbnail text search. RecLog runs a tiny (~10MB) OCR model locally to read the text inside thumbnails, so you can search for the words you remember seeing, not just the title. Saw a thumbnail that said "I quit my job" but the title was something generic? You'll still find it. - Search by title, channel, or thumbnail text. Fuzzy matching handles partial words and half-remembered phrases. - See how many times YouTube pushed a video at you. The toolbar badge shows your total logged recommendations, and each result shows how many times it appeared ("Seen 40x"), great for spotting the videos YouTube is desperate for you to watch. 100% LOCAL AND PRIVATE No account. No cloud. No tracking. No data leaves your browser. The OCR model runs entirely on your device, and your history is stored locally. Close the tab, close the browser, come back a week later: your log is still there. WHO IT'S FOR - Anyone who's ever hit refresh on the YouTube home page and lost a video they wanted to watch - People who remember thumbnails, not titles - Anyone tired of YouTube's search returning Shorts, ads, and "People also watched" instead of the video they actually want