Were you excited to hear that Podcasts were coming to Google Play Music? Were you equally disappointed to discover, unsurprisingly, that once again Australia – or anywhere outside of the US and Canada – missed out on a new Google feature? Well, it looks like Google hasn’t completely left the rest of the world out in the cold.

Google announced today that you can now search for a podcast via the Google app on Android and directly discover and play podcasts. We gave it a go with an Australian account with no VPN and this is what we got.

That’s right you can select one of the podcast results and start streaming it right to your phone. The player even loads to your notification tray.

While this is not conclusive proof that Google will be rolling out Podcasts wider than the current release, the fact that they haven’t geo-restricted this access at least give us hope.

The new feature will be great for easy discovery of podcasts where you can search and listen in one easy step all without having to load up a specific app. For those of us who are regular listeners to Podcasts, it’s unlikely this would replace out favourite Podcast player *cough* Pocket Casts *cough* but it’s a nice addition to our podcast arsenal.

Are you a podcast junkie? Do you think you will use this search and listen feature? Let us know below.