Podscope Promises to Index Entire Spoken Podcast Universe

 Podscope, a search engine that indexes the spoken audio content of podcasts, has announced that it plans to "cover all non-music audio and video podcasts by August 31, 2005".

Podscope crawls the web, looking for podcasts, and creates an index against each spoken word, thereby making the contents searchable. The user can search on a term, generate a list of results ranked by a variety of methods to find the most relevant podcast and click to play or click to download.

Podscope says that it currently indexes more than 20,000 podcasts from more than 3,500 sites and is on track to cover every known podcaster by the end of August. Site owners can submit their sites for indexing at the Podscope site.

"Imagine how less useful a Google search would be if Google only indexed the title of the Web pages it returns for a search. It just wouldn't have the same value as search that includes the entire content of the textual Web. Such simplistic search is what's being provided by every other audio and video search on the Internet, with the exception of Podscope," said David J. Ives, president and chief executive officer of TVEyes, Inc., whose technology and company are behind Podscope.

"Indexing the spoken word using advanced speech recognition technology has a profound impact on a consumer's ability to get the most out of audio and video search on the Internet," said Allen Weiner, research vice president at Gartner. "Relying only on metadata search or categorical listings provides incomplete results, making it difficult and inefficient to find specific content you'd like to listen to or watch."