YouTube itself is up but searching doesn't work. When entering in a query, the results page takes forever to load and eventually goes to a message saying YouTube is down for updates or something (should've saved it) and now i'm just getting a 500 internal server error.

It's back up now.

Google somehow got Orkut to stay online consistently-- can't they do the same for YouTube?

Ah, i'd noticed this when it came back up but didn't realize it was new. YouTube added the wonderwheel
googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009 ...

You can download youtube videos with Bywifi (Video Streaming Downloader). Bywifi is a free program for downloading, transcoding and accelerating video streaming.