Thank you! oh, how I would love to have a patch! 
Do you have a rough idea when this fix will be available on the playstore? The deeplink search is vital to my project. Let me explain why by way of response to your question on my custom app.
As background, we are a non-profit organization in the area of education technology, and a guiding principle for us is the use of Free and Open Source Software. As part of one of our programs this year, we are working on a number of audio-based digital learning lessons that will eventually get packaged up into podcasts. Timeline wise, this will be some time next month. The users of the podcasts will be school teachers. The teachers will have smartphones but not decent internet or desktop computers within the classroom. After considerable research, I have narrowed down to AntennaPod (AP) as a solution for delivering the digital content as podcasts and episodes.
The podcasts will be hosted on our server and teachers will download the content for offline, classroom use. AP is an excellent fit for us in many ways, and I am amazed at its rich capabilities and customizability (and special thanks for choosing the distributed/federated approach rather than bundling yet another online ‘service’)
Even to begin with, we are going to have multiple podcasts with dozens of episodes in each, and one key requirement is the ability for teachers to be able to easily search for the right podcast / episode within AP. We also want to be able to display a catalogue of the podcasts/episodes under various categories (like say Netflix does with genres).
While I have some feature suggestions for the AP (that I will write up and share later), what we are trying to do in the immediate term is create a very simple mobile interface with a catalogue of podcasts/episodes that will be searchable by podcast RSS categories. The categories could be subject, language, age suitable for and so on. The teacher should be able to identify individual podcast(s)/episode(s) easily via the categories and once they identify what they want, the approach is to deeplink from the individual catalogue item(s) to the corresponding podcast/episode in AP. At this point, the only way to get to an episode from my app seems to be via the AP search deeplink into the search screen. Then, once the teacher locates the episodes inside AP, they will work fully within AP…downloading the episode, custom tagging it, favorite’ing it, and so on, in addition to playing the episode within AP, of course.
Simply put, the custom app is a suitably customized search shell front-end for AP. This explains why the deeplink search is so critical for us
If you or anyone in the community have better suggestions to help us get where we want using AP, I am very open to suggestions.
Lastly, I do have a question on the deep link search once the fix is released. If I deep link by providing a query parameter e.g. the episode name, I suppose the search bar will first get automatically populated with the episode name. In addition, will the search results also show up automatically? or, does the user have to explicitly tap ‘enter’ on the search screen to see the results?