How to search for a specific podcast episode


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There are times when I want to search podcast episodes for previously published content. With over 600 episodes of The Business Storytelling Show, there’s plenty of content available that I may want to reference now – months or even years after it was originally published. But finding that content can be a challenge with podcast search engines being in their infancy.

Other times, I may want to search podcast episodes of other creators. Searching for content certainly isn’t a new thing and many of us search throughout the day for files, reports and content assets.

Let’s look at three ways that I’ve found that work.

Search Google

Many of us simply go to Google and search for “Business Storytelling Show: Voice strategy” to get episodes about that topic.

On your website

If you turn all episodes into articles, which I do actually recommend, you can also search on your website to find specific episodes. Or if you use Otter AI to create the transcripts, you can also search with Otter. What’s nice about this option is that this search would look through more content in addition to just the episode outline and description.

Search on Listen Notes

On Listen Notes, simply go to the show’s page and click on “search episodes.”

You can search for anything listed in the written episode descriptions. (Another reason why the description should be detailed. It will make it easier to find.)

search podcast episodes results on Listen Notes

Add search functionality to your podcast page

What’s awesome about the Listen Notes search functionality is that you can also add this form to your podcast page. It’s easily embeddable. Here’s how that looks on my podcast page.

embeddable search podcast form

When people enter a search term on the embedded form and click search they get the results on listennotes.com. Listen Notes works well on desktop and mobile browsers.

Share the found episode

Listen Notes also allows easy sharing and embedding of episodes. Just click on the share button below the episode in your results and you get this popup.

share episode

The embedded player looks like this:

embedded player

Search in the Goodpods app

If you prefer mobile apps to search podcast episodes, the Goodpods app is a way to do that.  You can download it from Google Play or the App Store. Simply go to the podcast that you want to search in the app.

search podcast episodes on Goodpods

I also use this functionality now to add related episodes to new episodes:

adding old podcast episodes to new ones


Final thoughts on finding old podcast episodes

Those are the ways I found to work when searching podcast episodes. For now, I would say the Listen Notes search is the easiest and most user-friendly – especially when I’m looking for podcast episodes to repurpose or to add to articles. It’s the easiest way to search and embed everything from one place. I bet at some point; other major networks will also offer this functionality. You can already search across the entire library of podcasts in many apps, including Apple, and Spotify.

And if you really want to search across everything that’s being said on episodes Otter AI is the way.

Transcribe your podcast with otter



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