As part of the general growth and diversification of media in different modalities, the presence of information in the form of human speech in the world-wide body of digital content is becoming increasingly significant, in terms of both volume and value. We present a semanticbased search model for human speech corpora, stressing the search for meanings rather than words. Our framework embraces the complete recognition/retrieval cycle, from word spotting to semantic annotation, query processing, and search result presentation.