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.
