Yahoo Offering New Podcasts Search

Yahoo is now offering a search engine for podcasts. And while I found a lot of stuff here I haven't found elsewhere, I felt like it was missing a couple of critical components. You can try it here: http://podcasts.yahoo.com/.

This front page is kinda busy and a little overwhelming. New and noteworthy podcasts are on the left. Most popular podcasts are in the middle. The tag cloud for this resource is on the lower right. (Everything was in the large font that I've come to expect for popular tags except "Canada". Huh?)

The actual search for podcasts is at the top of the page. You can search for episodes, for series, or for both. (You can also browse by category if you'd rather do that.)

I did a "both" search for reggae. I got 37 series results and 297 episode results. Results include title and description for the podcast or episode, as well as links which you can use to listen or subscribe.

Good thing: the series results had an episode count. The bad thing: the "published" text next to the episode count (for example: "Published: Sun, 9 Oct 2005 20:21:39 +0200") doesn't seem to have anything to do with the most recent episode. Looking at Near-dub Experience shows that the last episode was September 3, yet the Published: date was October 9. On the other hand, Dubsession's one-and-only episode was October 9, but the Published: date was October 3.

Having some kind of indicator on the search results of the most recent episode date would be very handy. I don't want to get all wound up about a really cool-sounding podcast only to discover that it only did two episodes four months ago. On the other hand, I would be more likely to explore a podcast that's published an episode in the last week. (The Published: line on the episode listings seems to be more up-to-date.)

Clicking on the name of the podcast gives you a little additional information including ratings and tags. You're also invited to add your own tags to the podcast listing (you have to be signed in to a Yahoo account to add tags.) Most of the episodes I looked at did not have ratings.

As I said, the search results found several episodes and series that I was not otherwise aware of. However, there were two big things missing to me. The first one was sort by date. There is date information on episodes, how about allowing to sort on it? The second was an RSS feed. How much easier it would be to keep up with keyword-specific episodes if I could monitor an RSS feed. There are some other little zippidytick things I'd like to have available (like an advanced search that allows filtering by podcast language) but those are the big two.

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