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.