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I have found out about Listen Notes. They provide a service to search and discover podcasts, including an API to build services on top of it.
I think it could be really interesting if Kagi could integrate it, in order to provide in the results more podcasts. I think this is an area where mainstream search engines fail: suggesting individual podcast episodes or whole podcasts on certain topics, or suggest similar podcasts.

Benefits
currently, the podcast widget appears automatically, and I think it surfaces results from Apple Podcasts. I find the search on Listen Notes to be more interesting. For example:

  • if I search "Baruch Spinoza" on Listen Notes I get a list ordered by "Listen Score" of very good quality podcast epidodes.
  • if I search "Baruch Spinoza podcast" on Kagi, I get a list of podcasts, some that seem appropriate, some that seem much lower quality. The "Listen Score" that Listen Notes uses seems to work well. Moreover, Listen Notes provides a direct link to the RSS for subscription, which is also handy and seems aligned with Kagi's ideal of fostering the small, indipendent web.

Integration

  • I imagine that it could replace the current podcast widget, perhaps augmenting it.
  • another cool function could be to recommend similar podcasts, which is another thing that Listen Notes provides.
  • it could also be used for surfacing detailed information when looking for a specific podcast. For example, by writing "This American Life", we could get a widget with podcast-centric information, and a link to the RSS.
  • Vlad replied to this.

    I didn't know Kagi used their APIs. Cool to know!
    Yeah, sorry, that was a very specific example. Even on more generic topics, though, it seems to me that the results of Listen Notes are ordered in a more relevant way. For example, let's say I want to search podcasts about the filter bubble:
    https://www.listennotes.com/search/?q=filter%20bubble&sort_by_date=0&scope=episode&offset=0&language=Any%20language&len_min=0
    https://kagi.com/podcasts?q=filter+bubble

    Kagi's results do not seem to me to be so good. The first two results are repeated, the other results are so so. On Listen Notes, I think the top three results are exactly what someone looking for a podcast about filter bubbles would like to have.

    You're right, though, there is overlap in general!

    • Vlad replied to this.

      matteoscopel We mix results of multiple sources. There are cases when listen notes produces much worse results so it equals out.

      We can check if something broke though.

        Vlad changed the title to Checj Listen Notes API integration .
          z64 changed the title to Check Listen Notes API integration .
            a month later
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