If you’re using podcasts to get your message to prospective customers, you should know about a whole new way for people to find your content. A new podcast search engine offers a breakthrough that may make podcasts easier to find than ever.
Up until now, podcast search was no better than image search, which depends on searchers using the words around the image file, or the name of the file itself. The search engine does not know that it’s a picture of a zebra—it is counting on the image being named “zebra.gif” (for example). Podcasts, until now, were similarly second-class content, compared to first class Web pages (and blog entries) that can be found by entering any word found on that page.
A new search engine, PODZINGER, takes a new approach, using speech recognition technology to convert podcasts (or any audio) to text. Speech recognition software can “listen” to audio and identify most of the words spoken, converting it to plain computer text, the same as any Web page. Once converted, any text search engine can find that audio file based on any word spoken.
PODZINGER is a neat tool that can help you find podcasts, but search marketers are waiting for mainstream search engines to offer speech recognition—when Google and Yahoo! can perform this trick, the average searcher will start to find podcasts. The development will cause a huge increase in podcast usage. You may even see it happen this year.
