Search for Text Within Podcasts With PodZinger

There haven't been many examples of good audio transcription search online; HP had one once but alas it has gone away. PodZinger offers a pretty sweet way to search transcribed audio from tens of thousands of podcasts. It does have a couple of disadvantages: currently it only searches in English, and it has no results for the word "podcast", so perhaps it's dictionary-only (though it does find NPR -- maybe "podcast" is considered a stopword?). You can try it at http://www.podzinger.com/.

Start with a keyword search; I tried springtime. I got 165 results, default-sorted by date (THANK YOU!) Results included the name of the podcast, series title, snippet where the word appeared, and a slick little control panel that lets you listen to the podcast, download it, get its RSS feed, or subscribe in Yahoo podcasts or iTunes. If you click on the time notation next to the snippet, you can play the snippet where your query word appears. (I had a little trouble with this in Firefox. I played one podcast, and then every time I would try to play other snippets the first second or so of the first podcast I played would play.) You have the option of narrowing your search to one of the podcasts which appears in your initial results.

At the top of the list of search results there is a link to subscribing to the podcast keyword search as an RSS feed, which is another way you can subscribe to podcasts based on keywords. This is a nice addition to the article I wrote for Squidward.

In addition to the podcast search there's also a Zing index (what's hot) and information on how to arrange for your own podcast to be indexed. Nice to see more stuff being done with audio transcription; I look forward to them adding content in other languages.

Posted to Internet-Technology-Podcasting | TrackBack