Yahoo Podcasts To Close; The Sorry State Of Podcast Search

Sigh. As someone who produces a podcast – and who has enjoyed searching for podcasts when going on roadtrips — I don’t get why podcast search isn’t more supported by the major search engines. Yahoo Podcasts, rolled out with promise back in October 2005, now sports a message at the top of the page saying "Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007."

Nice job, Yahoo. What, you can’t even post a link to a reason why you’re closing? No advice for what the podcast owners that actually promoted your service, about what they’re supposed to do with their channels? Is the site going poof, just not being supported at all in the future, or what?

Odeo used to be my podcast search site of choice. I could easily find top podcasts, see recommendations and more. Then the site slowly had features pulled and felt abandoned. Maybe the recent sale and relaunch planned for December will help. We’ll see.

Like Yahoo, AOL jumped in with a lot of hype when launching podcast search back in 2005. But when I did my recent look at AOL search services, I had to really hunt to find it. Looking again today, it doesn’t appear to even search for podcasts any longer. I can’t find my own Daily SearchCast, nor do searches seem to produce any podcast segment of the results. This is despite saying Podcast 101 right at the top. Instead, you have to know where AOL Search Audio is located, and who knows if that will last.

Podzinger was a long-standing service not run by a major search engine, but it rebranded itself EveryZing recently to incorporate video – because you know, it’s all about the video these days. After all, looking back to the majors, where’s Google Podcast Search? Microsoft Podcast Search? But over a billion to buy YouTube — no problem. They’ll chase the video ad cash with video search and ignore the fact that plenty of people listen to podcasts. How about a little love for them?

At least EveryZing does let you find podcasts. And I’ve found Digg Podcasts to be a useful way to find some interesting shows. Up Close With Digg Podcasts is my past review of the service. It’s coming up on one year in beta, and somehow I suspect it will sadly go the way of Yahoo Podcasts.

Yes, I know — there’s always iTunes. Sure, if I want to fire up Apple’s proprietary music software, I can head over there and find things. What a pain – especially when I want to download podcasts for my TomTom GPS, not for my iPod.

Read/WriteWeb seems the first to have spotted the closure and has some comments here, plus you can see a roundup of reaction on Techmeme here.