I started listening to an episode of the rest his history this morning about the Irish War of Independence. In the podcast they mentioned that there were some earlier episodes about Ireland and I was quite interested in trying to find them, but the experience of looking through the past episodes on the Podcast app was terrible.

So, with a bit of help from GPT and Claude code, within a few minutes I had this app up and running locally - code here:  https://github.com/IanMulvany/podcast-similarity-search

Titles and descriptions are indexed using vector search, so I can now search for "Ireland", while setting the "relatedness" of the search items:

Each episode links to related episodes:

And sure why not, let's add in a visualisation:

And make it work for any podcast:

So I've been using it to discover older interesting episodes. It took just a few minutes to create.