I just discovered Podzinger via Emily Chang’s eHub, itself a site you should make sure to check out if you haven’t. I was excited to look at a new podcast search engine, as the you never can have too many good options.

The things I look for in a podcast search engine are these:

• RSS feeds for my search queries – this is by far most important to me.
• Can I listen to excerpts where my search terms are used?
• How big is the engine’s index, or is it able to find shows about my topics of interest?
• Is it easy to submit a podcast for indexing?
• Is it easy to download the podcasts from the search results page?
• Are there any other features that I didn’t expect?

So what are our options and how do they compare?

Podzinger
RSS feeds are included, this is what interested my in this service. According to the search results page though, “RealPlayer and IE 5.0 or higher are required for audio playback.” You’ve got to be kidding. That means I won’t be listening to excerpts. At least the occurence of my search terms is time stamped. Podzinger has indexed is 20137 podcasts, seems to be growing and finds good results in my areas of interest (non-profit, social justice, ecology, etc.) It is very easy to submit a podcast to be indexed. Unexpected features? Check out the Podzinger registration page, where you can find code to insert a search for your own podcast into your web site. Nice, but does it rely on RealPlayer as well?

Conclusion: I’ll be subscribing to feeds from Podzinger and might consider recommending it to people who want to add a search function to their own podcast’s web page. I won’t be visiting the Podzinger site itself very often as I find its requirements to listen to excerpts frustrating.

Yahoo Podcast Search
Feeds? Nope, and that’s surprising given how well RSS is embraced generally at Yahoo. Can I listen to excerpts? Nope. Listening is through a proprietary Yahoo podcast listener thing that I don’t really trust, but worse than that – you have to log in to a Yahoo account in order to download the files! Once I do that even, I’m taken straight through to loading the audio file on my browser! I want to click a button and chose to download the file onto my hard drive, thank you. I don’t see how many files are indexed, though I imagine lots of people have figured out how to submit to this service. I am so upset by how dumbed-down and locked up this interface is that I don’t even want to look at Yahoo podcast search anymore! As for interesting features, the searches do separate podcast series that are described using your search terms vs. episodes in which your search terms are said. Additionally, there are listener reviews, tagging, etc. Yahoo has so much money and status that I’m sure you can probably find lots of interesting things with it, but the difficulty in downloading, the lack of an RSS feed and the requirement that I login with a Yahoo ID all make me so angry that I will probably never recomend this search engine to anyone.

Blinkx.com
I love Blinkx. They were the fist service I found that offered an RSS feed for searches, and their customer service has been incredibly helpful and engaged with problems I’ve had with them! I love them! Unfortunately, there are problems here too. Search results only deliver the episode title and not the source show or podcast series name. That’s strange. You can’t listen to excerpts around your search terms, that too is a real shame. But it is very easy to download the files in your search terms. I can’t tell how many podcasts they index, but it is very easy to submit podcasts for indexing. Innovative features include a slider to prioritize date or relevance in the order your search results appear in. I like Blinkx best of all of these options, though I wish some of the feature omissions weren’t an issue.

Podscope
I rarely use this service because there is no RSS feed for my searches! Executives from the company said in an interview I listened to that they would be supporting RSS soon…and that was months and months ago. Whoa, I take it back! Upon visiting the site again I see that they have added RSS. Yay! This is a new contender for my absolute favorite. The search results are displayed beautifully. You can easily listen to excerpts based on your search terms, it’s easy to download the files, there are great links to the podcast’s home page, the search-discovered episode’s permalink and the podcasts RSS feed. It is easy to submit a podcast for indexing and they too now offer a search box for your show’s site. Wow! This is great, go check it out and click on some Adsense.

Conclusion: I think that Podscope may be my new favorite. I am so excited to see the changes they’ve made.

Feedster Podcast Search
I love Feedster. They offer customer service almost 24-7 via IM! And it was really helpful customer service when I contacted them. They do, of course, offer feeds for searches. You cannot listen to excerpts around your search terms, you can select either series descriptions or episodes to search inside. Download is easy and you can chose either date or relevance as priority for display of your search results. I can’t tell how hard it is to submit or how big the index is. The front page says “Currently Indexing feeds from different podcasts.” Well isn’t that nice?

Conclusion amongst conclusions: When I have multi-media research needs for myself or a client, I am most likely to subscribe to feeds for my queries from Blinkx, Feedster and now Podscope and Podzinger. If I am doing a one time search for audio content, I am going to search inside Podscope so that I can listen to excerpts around my search terms. If I’m looking for shows about a certain subject, as opposed to particular episodes that mention my search term…I might begrudgingly use Yahoo.

Technorati Tags: podcasts, search, podcast, audio, RSS, Yahoo, Blinkx, Podscope, Feedster, Podzinger