We built PodSearch.io because we kept running into the same frustrating problem: someone says something brilliant in a podcast, and it's essentially impossible to find again. You can search podcast titles and descriptions, but that covers maybe 1% of the actual content. The other 99% — every conversation, every insight, every expert opinion — is locked inside audio files, invisible to search engines.
Today, we're changing that.
What PodSearch.io Does
PodSearch.io is an AI-powered search engine built specifically for podcast content. We transcribe podcast episodes using state-of-the-art speech recognition, then build a full-text search index that lets you find the exact moment someone said something. Type a query, and you get results from inside episodes — with highlighted snippets showing exactly where your search terms appear in the transcript.
4.6M+
Podcasts Indexed
180M+
Episodes
2.5M+
Hours Transcribed
<1s
Search Speed
How It Works
At a high level, PodSearch.io has three stages:
- Ingestion — We continuously discover and index podcast feeds from the Podcast Index, pulling in metadata like titles, descriptions, artwork, and episode information.
- Transcription — Episodes are processed through our transcription pipeline, powered by OpenAI's Whisper model. Each episode is broken into time-stamped segments, enabling precise navigation to specific moments.
- Search — Transcripts are indexed using PostgreSQL's native full-text search with weighted ranking. When you search, we return relevant snippets with highlighted terms, ranked by relevance across multiple signals: transcript content, episode titles, descriptions, and podcast metadata.
Why Now?
The podcast industry has exploded. There are over 4 million podcasts and hundreds of millions of episodes, creating a vast ocean of spoken knowledge. At the same time, speech recognition technology has reached a tipping point — models like Whisper can transcribe audio with near-human accuracy across dozens of languages. The infrastructure cost of processing audio at scale has dropped dramatically.
The pieces are finally in place to make podcast content truly searchable. We're excited to be building this, and we'd love for you to try it out.
Get Started
PodSearch.io is free to use. Create an account to save episodes, follow podcasts, and keep track of your search history. Head over to the search page to try it out.