I was searching for mentions of Wired News and Webmonkey in various podcasts today, and I spent some time playing with all of the podcast search tools on the web. Here are some useful ones to check out.

Most of the podcast search tools develop their indexes by parsing the audio content of podcasts using speech-to-text software. They can create a text version of the podcast that’s much faster to search. Tricky words are usually double-checked.

Podzinger made waves a few months ago when it revolutionized audio searches. One extremely cool feature of Podzinger is that it maps the words to the correct place in the podcast, so you can start listening to the audio at the point where your search term appears.

BlinkX lets you search TV and video clips from most of the web’s video directories and videoblogs. They have an integrated player built into their page, and they offer free “one-click” downloads of videos so you can easily store them on your video iPod or video device.

But the one that takes the cake is definitely Podscope. They were the first major podcast search engine, launching around a year ago. Podscope has the best interface of any of these tools, and it makes downloading or subscribing to your targeted podcasts incredibly easy. Also, with searches for both audio and video podcasts and clips, Podscope is super-comprehensive. They call themselves the Google for podcasts, which is pretty close to true. At least it is until Google itself starts dishing out Podcast searches…