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Comment by helmholtz | Hacker News Reader

By contrast, Spotify's Episode Search is the best in the business, bar none. At least on Android. All the other options are so fucking bad, it makes me mad. Let's say I want to search not for a podcast, but all podcasts featuring "Alex Honnold". Well, when I type that in to Spotify, it gives me loads of podcasts he's appeared on, with the option to start playing the episode immediately.

All the other apps that I've tried, AntennaPod, PocketCasts, Podcast Addict, are in stone age. How do these other apps expect me to discover podcasts? They are just glorified RSS feeds, these other apps.

Having said that, I don't want to pollute my music with my podcasts, so I don't use Spotify for podcasts anyway :)

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I used to use Player.fm as my main podcast app, and it had a pretty good episode search feature.

> All the other apps that I've tried, AntennaPod, PocketCasts, Podcast Addict, are in stone age. How do these other apps expect me to discover podcasts? They are just glorified RSS feeds, these other apps.

I didn't know PocketCasts was lacking this too! When I switched to AntennaPod, this was the only feature I really missed. But by now, I've gotten used to just websearching for podcast episodes and then opening them in AntennaPod after the fact.

The Google Podcasts app has search like that on Android as well. I agree that it's amazing that there is such a dearth of usable podcast apps out there, especially on Android.

The problem there is you need to install the Google app in addition to the podcast app, something I refuse to do. I just don't get why podcast search is so appalling, and why it's not a bigger deal. It drives me bananas.

Pocket Casts has a whole “Discover” tab with both algorithmic and human-curated recommendations, as well as browsing by category. I’m not sure what more you could ask for except for maybe user-generated shareable playlists.

Pocket Casts even has this excellent feature where you can share a link to the current time stamp in an episode and share it. The recipient of the link doesn’t even need to download the app; the shared snippet is playable right in the browser.

Read my lips: "Episodes". I want to search through bloody episodes! I want it to go through it's entire index of ALL episode titles, show-notes and transcripts and find me relevant podcast episodes where the phrase I searched is relevant.

I don't want discovery, I don't want AI, and I certainly don't care for any sharing things. I want to be able to find content. And I don't want to go join a series on Episode 592 and go backwards. I'm interested in a topic: Jennifer Aniston, Alex Honnold, Dieter Rams, GUI libraries in Rust, C++ game development, Financial Independence. I just want it to show me individual episodes!

It'd be like searching google for "GUI library in Rust" and it showing me the Rust website and saying "good luck out there!" It should just search the bloody websites and show me the relevant webpage.

Hmm. You can search episode names and show notes on Pocket Casts on a per-show but not a global basis. I guess that is a shortcoming.

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