Best Podcast Search Engine
Finding a podcast is easy; finding relevant episodes is more difficult. If you want to find, say, all of Paul F. Tompkins’ guest talks or podcast episodes about the Russian Revolution, try the podcast search engine Listen Notes .
Listen Notes is a serious search engine with a database of over 18 million episodes from over 300,000 podcasts. Find any topic that can be discussed across multiple podcasts.
Let’s say you want to find a few episodes about the Erie Channel . The results page contains a detailed card for each issue, including a stream, download link, and subscription links. You can sort by relevance or date. (The latter is useful for checking in the same search from time to time.) You can also select results for a single episode or results for a podcast title.
Click a result to see a more detailed description of the episode and a general description of the podcast. Each podcast is also tagged with its own iTunes categories.
Listen Notes works great on mobile too, making the transition from the results app to podcasts much less painful: just copy and paste the RSS link, or click the iTunes link to open it in the Apple Podcasts app. Unfortunately, this will only take you to the podcast and not to a specific episode, but it’s still better than any other search engine we’ve used.
Developer Wenbin Fang has created an application and is launching it himself. He informed me via email that he plans to improve the interface and add community features and possibly an episode audio search. He removed his early versions of mobile apps, but hopes to eventually restart them.
Fang compares his current database to Google’s database, which indexed 25 million pages in 1998 – not much more than 18 million episodes of Listen Notes. “I don’t know, maybe someday Listen Notes will be as big as Google. Haha, “he writes on the Hear Notes page , and frankly, it seems like there is a chance. There are a couple of other decent podcast search engines with more flamboyant interfaces that are run by larger teams, but they have a fatal omission that they can easily fix, but that shows they aren’t trying to be Google podcasting.
Audiosear.ch lets you filter by date, duration, category and network, and also includes an episode sound search (based on automatic transcription) for some shows, which is impressive when it works. Stitcher Search is better for certain queries, such as finding podcasts about the Welcome to Night Vale podcast .
But none of these sites link to an iTunes podcast page or RSS feed. (Stitcher lets you add it to the Stitcher app.) To add a podcast to your favorite app, you’ll have to search for it over and over again.
This is too much for one pain point, and it shows that these sites have a different business plan; Audiosear.ch wants to be the engine for other apps, while Stitcher wants to create its own exclusive ecosystem. For the rest, the best option is ” Listen to Notes” .