Google is making it easier to find and listen to audio content specific to your search interests, with playable episodes surfaced in results that begin rolling out today.

Playable podcasts can show up in results when you use “podcasts” as a keyword in your search, together with different terms. It’s meant to deliver relevant results free of the confines of a dedicated podcast player, and Google additionally intends to increase this search feature to queries that don’t even specify “podcast” as it refines its algorithms.

Google is additionally planning to be rolling out this inline playable results feature for the search function in Google Podcasts on the web, and for Google Assistant. If you’re logged in, it’ll also synchronize your results thus you’ll pick up from where you left off within the dedicated Google Podcasts app.

This should be great for discoverability since it means a much broader potential audience will stumble across your podcasts than would be possible with existing tools, and sample them on the spot. However, Google still plans to roll out finer controls for publishers, which suggests you will be able to specify wherever people can hear them, and presumably where they can’t.

It’s a sign that podcasts are becoming more relevant and mainstream, and that Google is very interested in making sure that it doesn’t fall behind on ensuring this content is part of its overall search index and not the exclusive domain of other, more closed ecosystems that exist outside its sphere of influence.

With availability starting out for U.S users searching in English, Google will be rolling out this feature gradually worldwide. 

Source: https://mashable.com/search/?t=stories&q=social%20media  31/07/19