What is Podzinger?
Podzinger is an audio and video search engine, powered by "30 years of speech recognition research from BBN Technologies." Podzinger is unique in that it actually peeks inside the spoken words of the medium itself to find what you're looking for - and then your search terms are highlighted in the search results. It's easy to use, and while it does not retrieve a ton of results (still in beta), and the search results are difficult to narrow down - yet I still see that there's a lot of potential with Podzinger.Search Within the Spoken Word with Podzinger
Searching for the spoken word has not really been addressed with most generalized search engines. Podzinger is one of the first search engines on the spoken word scene.However, while the concept behind Podzinger is solid, the actual results need some major tweaking. For example, I searched for amphibians podcast and got frankly horrible results. Even after I put in quotes and attempted to do more tricksy things to get Podzinger to find this indie band (check out theAmphibians site), I still only came up with a couple different podcast results, neither of which really had anything to do with what I was looking for.
Same with my search for christian podcast; I was sorely disappointed. Perhaps one of my results had anything to do with what I was looking for; the rest were just not relevant.
Why Should I Use Podzinger?
Honestly, I had mixed feelings about Podzinger. It's got some pretty solid technology behind it, and the search interface and search experience are both cleanly designed and easy to implement. However, I found that the actual Podzinger search results just weren't as great as I was hoping for.Podzinger - Good Concept, Not Ready for Prime Time
Podzinger has great potential. I love that it actually looks for the searched for keywords within the audio or video medium itself; however, this needs some major tweaking since the search results just are not that great at this point of Podzinger's development. I'll come back and update this article as Podzinger becomes more of the spoken word search engine that I hope it will one day be.
Podzinger Updates: Podzinger has recently unveiled the capability to search within YouTube for the spoken word. Read more in my article titled Search YouTube with Podzinger.
