Searching for podcast episodes beyond subscriptions

Hey folks. Forgive me if this is already implemented and I’m just missing it, but I can’t seem to search for episodes beyond my already subscribed feed.

One thing I relied upon with the Spotify app is that if I listen to an interview and want to find other shows or episodes with that guest, the search results allow me to search by episode or podcast, whether or not I am subscribed – and ideally by chronological order. I seem to find most new podcasts this way.

Thanks!

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This functionality does not exist yet. AntennaPod uses the iTunes or PodcastIndex database and Api to search. I beleive PodcastIndex will make episode searching available soon. Once that is done, we can add episode search in AntennaPod.

Welcome to the community!

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Excellent. Good to know.

Good news, podcastindex.org has a search by person api. This api would solve your use case of searching for a guest.

https://podcastindex-org.github.io/docs-api/#get-/search/byterm

I could imagine implementing this 2 ways

  1. When we see a search we will do 2 searches, one by podcast keyword and one by person and merge them. This might be confusing, it maybe better to call the person api only when there are no results from search for podcast by keyword.

  2. When you are listening to a podcast, we show the guest from the podcastindex person tag, we show a link that directly allows you to search.

Either 1 or 2, this will bring up the feature of listening to episodes without subscribing to a podcast.

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Sounds great! I think both options are good to implement. For myself, it’d save a few steps. I’d imagine there are others who do something similar.

As to #1, I’m used to how Spotify works, for a starter. When searching, it of course starts showing results right away, which can be annoying, but the results are mixed episodes and podcasts, below the first 10 or so, you can then tap ‘search episodes’ or ‘search podcasts and shows’ to specify your preference.

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This I think would be great to have either way. We’d need to see how/where this fits in the UI.

The people search returns podcasts/episodes, right, not people? If it returned people I figured it would be cool to display a row of people (if any) on the top of the search results, just as it displays podcasts when searching for episodes locally.

But given (if) this doesn’t work, I think you’re right in that it could be confusing.
I think to make it work we would need a more advanced search dialog, and only search for episodes with people if a user filled in the people search field. Then it’s active interaction and the user would be less/not confused about mixing episodes & podcasts.

Having a more advanced search dialog would also allow to filter based on country, language, etc

Afterthought: I think by default (& in most cases) AntennaPod should just show podcasts, not episodes. Reason is that it’s built around the model of subscriptions, and not necessarily that great for listening individual episodes.

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I love this idea. I currently use podcast addict since this is the only app that I’ve found to have this feature but I’m also trying to move to antennapod.

Are there any news regarding this feature? :slight_smile:

PS Love this app! And the community is very friendly too!

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Looks like @adguardgirl filed a ticket here but I still don’t see podcastindex.org having a search by episode feature Option to search episodes from podcasts that you are and are NOT subscribed to based on a keyword · Issue #5288 · AntennaPod/AntennaPod · GitHub