Listen Notes is a podcast search engine that actually works. At the time I am writing this, it includes 360,830 podcasts and 19,553,596 episodes.

Use the Listen Notes search engine to find people, places, topics, and more. Or, click on any of the subjects that are sitting below the search engine to have Listen Notes bring up a page filled with podcast episodes where that subject was discussed.

Listen Notes was built by a self-funded, one-person team: a software engineer in San Francisco who is going by the name Wenbin. Listen Notes has become Wenbin’s full-time job. Wenbin is an avid podcast listener who would become interested in a certain topic, find a lot of podcast episodes about that topic, and then binge listen to all of them.

Think about this: In the early days of the web, people bookmarked websites on their browsers and regularly visited those few websites. When Google became a verb, fewer and fewer people need to bookmark websites. We just search for pages. Oftentimes, we don’t care what websites these web pages belong to. A podcast is like a website. An episode is like a web page. I bet that the “Subscribe to a podcast then listen” model will change. Listeners will search & find individual episodes to listen, if there’s a podcast search engine that actually works.

Podcasters who would like to see their podcast on Listen Notes can submit a “missing podcast” form. Conversely, if you don’t want to have your podcast listed on Listen Notes, you can tell Wenbin (by sending an email to hello@listennotes.com). Your podcast will be removed within 12 hours.