Google has announced that you are now able to play podcasts directly in the desktop and mobile search results. Google said, “Starting today, when you’re searching for a podcast about a topic on Google, we’ll show you playable episodes in Search results alongside web pages, news, images and videos.”
Here are some screen shots of this in action, including a GIF:
According to Google, it will surface episodes based on the search engine’s understanding of what’s being talked about on a podcast. What this means is that Google will try indexing the words said in the podcasts and show you relevant podcasts based on those words. Google will expand this so that soon, you won’t have to add the term “podcast” in your search to see episodes.
This feature will also be coming to Google Assistant later this year, according to Google. If you ask Google Assistant for podcasts on a topic, it will suggest relevant episodes.
Currently, this is launching in the US for English language queries.
This expands how Google was previously displaying podcasts in search using only the titles and meta data. Google is now showing podcast that have the content within the actual episode, not just the title or meta data of the podcast file.