Matt Birchler made a really cool searchable database for his Comfort Zone podcast, complete with clickable transcripts that start the audio so you can hear your search query in context. He envisions it as something podcasters could sign up for:

[Users could] add their own RSS feed, and then all details would automatically pull from their feed. The back end should also automatically check for updates on feeds every 6 hours or something like that as well. Transcript updates should pull from the remote files and not be a part of the code base, and there could be an upload UI to add these files from the web portal.

You’ve gotta go play around with it. All the show notes for each episode are also there, and included in the search — a nice touch.

Personally, I think all podcast websites should work like this! It’d be way more useful that most podcast hosting service-provided sites.