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Search Engine
Search Engine is the podcast that tries to answer the questions that keep you up at night. A podcast made by humans that provides the answers that neither artificial intelligence nor actual search engines really can. Named one of the best podcasts of 2023 by Vulture, Time, The Economist, and Vogue.
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For years, the must-have phone for the discerning drug trafficker or hitman was a brand you may not have heard of: AN0M. Reporter Joseph Cox tells us the story of the AN0M phone, its sudden rise and s...
· 1 hr 4 min 55 sec
We are in an eighty-eight day sprint to the Presidential election. How would you follow this story if you wanted to actually understand something, instead of, like me, just feeling very anxious severa...
· 1 hr 4 min 5 sec
A trip to Greenland, a chance encounter with Coolio, and the end of the world. (This summer we’re publishing some of our favorite episodes from our previous series, Crypto Island.)Support the show ove...
· 56 min 6 sec
An art heist in the crypto world plunges us headfirst into another mystery — why did so many celebrities suddenly start selling us on NFTs last year? (This summer we’re publishing some of our favorite...
· 41 min 9 sec
This week: Bitcoin. We trace it from its humble origins in a .PDF to the movement it has spawned, all over three days at an enormous Bitcoin conference in Miami. (This summer we’re publishing some of...
· 1 hr 8 min 50 sec
A story about a strange auction for perhaps the most valuable piece of paper in America. This summer we’re publishing some of our favorite episodes from our previous series, Crypto Island.Support the...
· 51 min 18 sec
We travel to Germany to trace techno's history from Detroit to Berlin. The story of how, after the Wall fell, Berlin exorcised its brutal past with a very strange, decade-long party. A mission that ta...
· 1 hr 13 min 34 sec
Two Americans embark on a quest: fly across an ocean to try to get into the most exclusive nightclub in the world – Berghain. A German techno palace where the line outside can last 8 hours, and the bo...
· 55 min 18 sec
This week, we try to understand an experience that 74% of Americans routinely report having. The first of many conversations (perhaps?). This one, an interview with Zvika Krieger.Support the show: sea...
· 1 hr 7 min 6 sec
An internet breaking news story. As we told you last week, Google has begun offering AI-generated answers to search questions. But some answers, it turns out, are strange. Users were told, for instanc...
· 45 min 44 sec
Last week, Google announced a fundamental change to how the site will work, which will likely have dire effects for the news industry. When you use Google now, the site will often offer AI-generated s...
· 1 hr 4 min 22 sec
After stumbling on a new kind of search engine for faces, we called privacy journalist Kashmir Hill. She’s been reporting on the very sudden and unregulated rise of these facial search engines. Here’s...
· 1 hr 56 sec
A listener’s brother dies by suicide, and afterwards, she finds herself angered by trigger warnings about suicide. She wants to know — are these actually helping other people? Or is it just something...
· 59 min 29 sec
Since not long after the car was invented, we have wanted to stick wings on them and fly them through the sky. This week, we interview writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus about the surprisingly long history of...
· 55 min 40 sec
It’s an election year and so Search Engine’s campaign desk is answering the questions you really want answers to: all the political yard signs in your neighbors’ yards … do they do anything besides ma...
· 37 min 9 sec
In part two of our story, we watch the state of New York try to pull off something we rarely see in America: a kind of reparations. A very ambitious dream encounters a thicket of details and complicat...
· 1 hr 8 min 42 sec
In 2021, New York legalized cannabis for adults. It was supposed to be the start of a legal market, led by people arrested during prohibition. Instead, a strange new market has flourished, seemingly e...
· 52 min 19 sec
We've launched a new premium feed called Incognito Mode. It includes bonus episodes of Search Engine and some other very special features. We're including a preview episode here: an interview with a v...
· 13 min 51 sec
Something strange, new, and unsettling is happening in media right now. Huge institutions, both newspapers and online outlets, are being severely transformed by layoffs.As a person just trying to find...
· 1 hr 2 min 37 sec