Audiosear.ch: Full Text Podcast and Radio search engine
Audiosear.ch is a free online service that enables you to run full text searches on podcasts and radio shows the service has indexed.
There are thousands of podcasts out there, and some have produced hundreds of episodes. The majority of podcasts and radio shows don't offer transcripts, so that you are left with titles and descriptions to find out whether a topic is covered in an episode.
This is quite time consuming, and results depend largely on the description. Search options usually include only titles, descriptions and maybe tags as well. This may be useful, but it is far from perfect.
Audiosear.ch
Audiosear.ch comes to the rescue. The search engine specializes in podcasts and radio shows, and indexes podcasts and shows completely. This means that you can run full text searches on the site to find all podcasts and Radio shows that include the keywords that you enter.
There is obviously still a chance that the transcription gets it wrong, but search appears to work well for the most part.
It works by entering a phrase into the search engine on the Audiosear.ch homepage. This can be the name of a show or people, networks, topics of interest, or any other keyword you are interested in.
A search for "windows 10" for instance reveals all matching podcasts and shows. This includes shows that use Windows 10 in the title or description, but also shows that use it only in the show itself, and not in the title or description.
You may change the sort order from relevancy to date or duration on the search results page. EAch result is listed with its name and related information, such as main category (e.g. technology), and tags.
There is a link to iTunes which you can click on to open the podcast or show on iTunes. You may click on the title as well to open a details page right on the Audiosear.ch website.
It enables you to play the podcast or show right on the site, read a detailed description of the show, and check out related shows or podcasts as well. A download option is not provided however which is a bit unfortunate.
Search and listening functionality is free, and you don't need an account for that either. The same is true for several handy indexes that Audiosear.ch maintains. The site has a people's index for instance, a list of shows, charts, and a recommendation service that suggests a new podcast every day.
The service offers a couple of handy add-on features that do require an account. One is called audio alerts, and it does exactly what it says. It pushes notifications to the linked email account whenever a word or phrase is mentioned in a podcast that gets indexed by the service after you set up the audio alert.
Closing Words
Audiosear.ch is a mighty useful service that provides you with options to run full text searches on the index of podcast episodes and radio shows. You can listen to these directly on the site, and use other features for free like the site's indexes.
Fantastic! Thanks for this, Martin. There used to be a site like this years ago, a search engine devoted exclusively to radio shows and podcasts. Hewlett-Packard may have been behind it. But unfortunately it disappeared a long time ago, and since then I’ve been wishing there would be a site like this again. Thanks for letting us know about this!
Not for gospelmusic: Velasquez and Tornquist, not there, to bad
Thanks for posting this – could come in very handy for large audio/video files.
Up until now I had been relying solely on the audio index/search functionality within MS Office OneNote for my audio/video files (which is really smart/useful, by the way).
work on MAC?
This is a web service, it should work on any Internet device with a modern browser.
Only nine months later and the site now says this: “Hey there! We ended operations and support for Audiosear.ch on 11/28/17.”
This is so frustrating! Is there no way to run dedicated searches for podcasts and radio shows? If anyone knows of anything, please post!
Listen Notes (for podcasts at least)
https://www.listennotes.com/