Yes, and more than one kind. Which one you need depends on two things: how many transcripts you have, and whether a hit has to take you back to the video. Searching a single transcript needs no tool at all beyond the find command you already have. Searching a few hundred of them, and landing on the right minute of the right video, is a different problem, and that is where most people get stuck.
Searching one transcript for a word or phrase
Open the transcript and use find. If it is an SRT or VTT, every line carries a timecode, so a match hands you the position in the video for free. If it is a plain text file or a pasted block, the match tells you the words were said and nothing about where.
Transcription apps and transcript-based editors do this with a better interface: a search box over the transcript, and clicking a result moves the playhead. For one interview or one episode, this is the whole answer, and nothing more sophisticated will beat it. What those tools cover and where they stop is laid out in the text-based editor category.
Searching across many transcripts for a keyword
Once transcripts live in a folder as text files, a command-line search covers all of them at once and prints the file and the line. That is unglamorous and it works. The things that break are mundane: filenames that do not match the videos anymore, episodes transcribed by three different tools in three formats, transcripts that were never generated for the oldest material.
The other common setup is transcripts published on a website rather than kept as files. That is where keyword search stops being enough. A long-running podcast with hundreds of corrected transcripts posted online is genuinely hard to search, and the workaround people fall back on is a site-scoped query in a search engine, which returns a page rather than a moment and only covers what the engine has indexed.
Transcript search that is scoped to a project
Editing software and media tools that index transcripts generally confine the search to the project or bin you imported. That is fine while you are cutting one thing and limiting once you are looking across years of material. Searching an archive you keep offline runs into the same wall from the other direction: the tool is per project, and the archive is not.
When the problem is not the keyword
Keyword search assumes you remember the words. Often you remember what the passage was about. No amount of exact-match searching gets you from "somebody talked about being nervous before going on stage" to the right ninety seconds, because the person may never have used those words.
Content search works on the meaning instead. In one search on our own connector, that question returned segments from several different videos in a library of instructional material, each with a line explaining why it was picked, including a moment where a performer admitted being nervous in the middle of playing. That is the gap Vivu fills for footage already uploaded to a project: each video is indexed once, and the answer comes back as time ranges with a reason attached rather than a column of word matches. Someone still reviews them, because the same run returned a passage about taking years to relax on stage, and whether that counts was a judgment call.
This is also the practical argument for keeping the transcript route and the content route separate rather than picking one. They fail at opposite things. Handing an assistant the transcript versus handing it a search turns on the same split.
When you do not need a tool for this
If you have one transcript, you do not have a transcript search problem, you have a keyboard shortcut. If you have ten and you search them twice a year, a folder and a command-line search is cheaper than evaluating anything. If your material is short and you know it well, scrubbing is faster than reading.
The tool question only earns its keep in one situation: the archive is large enough that you cannot remember which video a passage is in, and you go looking often enough that the time adds up. At that point, decide by what you remember when you start searching. If it is usually the wording, invest in getting clean timestamped transcripts for everything and search the text. If it is usually the gist, text search will keep failing you no matter how good the transcripts get.
FAQ
Can I search transcripts that are published on my website?
Only through whatever search your site already offers, which is usually page-level. A site-scoped query in a search engine is the common workaround, and it has two limits worth knowing: it only covers pages the engine has crawled and indexed, and a hit identifies the episode page rather than the point in the episode. If the transcripts also exist as files somewhere, searching those files directly is more reliable than searching the published versions.
Is searching a transcript the same as searching the video?
No, and the difference costs people real time. A transcript only contains what was said, so anything shown and not spoken is invisible to it: a product on a table, a facial reaction, a graph on a slide. A transcript search also only returns a position in the video if the transcript kept its timecodes. Treat transcript search as audio search, because that is what it is.
Do transcript search tools work on transcripts I made elsewhere?
Sometimes. Some accept an imported SRT or VTT and search it as-is, which keeps the corrected text you already paid for. Others generate their own transcript from the media and ignore whatever you bring, which means human corrections you made in another tool are silently dropped. Check this before you migrate a library, since re-correcting hundreds of transcripts is worse than the problem you set out to solve.
How many transcripts is too many for plain text search?
Search speed is not the breaking point. A command-line search handles thousands of text files without complaint. The breaking point is relevance: a common word across a large archive returns hundreds of matches with no ordering, and reading through them is slower than the search was. When a query starts returning more hits than you are willing to open, the thing you need is not a faster search over the words.