See What Podcasts Are Being Listened to Right Now
Listen Notes, Lifehacker’s favorite podcast search engine , has a new live feed that shows which podcasts its users are listening to. These people are streaming podcasts on the site and not on their regular player, so this won’t tell you the most popular podcasts in general. In fact, while you’ll see tons of popular shows, you’ll also discover things that will never appear on the top charts of Google or Apple.
Listen Notes creator Wenbin Fang believes that the most important unit of podcasting is the episode, not the show. Thus, the search engine returns results for one episode. And if you click on any of the episodes in the live feed, you can immediately start streaming them.
Unlike the top charts, search terms show a long tail: something that only a few people are looking for at any given time. More people will search for popular podcasts than unpopular ones, but they will also search for specific guests or topics. Fang tells Lifehacker that this live feed helps people see a wide variety of search queries without compromising the privacy of anyone’s search terms.
If you want another search tool, Fang just released an experimental iOS app called Just Listen , which is similar to Tinder for podcasting. (Fang tells Lifehacker it’s more like TikTok, but we’re too old for that.) The app plays a random (not technically random) podcast episode for you, and you skip or keep listening. The app tries to learn from your choice. While most podcast tools direct and keep users on a specific show, this app is like switching the radio. It probably won’t be your favorite way to listen to podcasts, but it might be a good way to open them up.