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A Very Cool Podcast Service

By DAVID POGUE

OK, now this is totally and unbelievably cool.

You know, don’t you, that podcasts are like little downloadable radio shows, often made by amateurs? They’re so personal and quirky, they’re almost like the audio version of Web logs.

Unfortunately, they’re also audio, so you can’t exactly search them with Google. You can’t search for words inside an audio file, right?

Wrong. Somehow, the folks at Podscope.com have figured out how to do it. Introducing: the first search engine that can find podcasts according to the words spoken during them! It’s in beta, but I tried it, and it really, truly works. The search results offer you a ten-second preview of the podcast, plus links to the whole thing.