I must start this post by giving a plug to Netvibes, my favorite personal homepage. One of the features of Netvibes allows one to add a widget to a page that searches multiple podcast directories at once - ODEO, iTunes, Podemus (a French directory) and Pluggd.

I noticed Pluggd right away because of one simple fact: when I searched for Orlando, I actually got relevant results. iTunes did a decent job, and ODEO was so-so, but Pluggd showed me lots of things I hand't heard of, but would like to listen to. In addition to searching individual shows, you can also search Channels, which is the word I like to use when talking about podcasts.

Here is where it gets cool (and disappointing): apparently Pluggd has a service called HearHere, which lets you interactively search inside a show for a keyword, and they even use semantic matching to try and determine relevance. If you watch the video by PodTech.net, you'll see what I mean.

Here's the disappointing thing: it looks like you can only do this on the ESPN show. The pop-up player for all of the other shows doesn't have the extra tabbies to let you search inside the show... sigh. Guess I'll stick with Podzinger for now.