Search by spoken word

Posted by Laura Bergells

May 6, 2005

I found a neat site that has potential (it’s still in beta, but I can see the potential once it gets rocking.)

The site is www.podscope.com, and the fascinating part is that it searches by spoken word instead of written word. That means that when you enter your search term, it pulls up the point in the podcast where the word is spoken. So if you’re interested in a particular topic, but the podcaster doesn’t actually speak the word until — let’s say — minute 17 of a 30 minute podcast, you can go directly to minute 17 and bypass the opening sequence or any other items that you might not want to hear.

I used podscope to find 10 podcasts that cover a particular topic in which I have an acute interest. In almost every podcast, my topic was only touched upon toward the middle or end of the entire presentation! But with podscope I was able to preview each presenter’s style and sample their content before I committed to listening to their entire message.

As a result, I found one very good podcast among the mix.

Try it – searching by spoken word has the potential to change the rules about how people will find your online content.