Cambridge, Massachusetts - ( Website Hosting Directory ) - January 11, 2006 - A new search engine for podcasts has launched today. PodZinger announced the launch of its podcast search engine which is based on 30 years of speech recognition research and development from BBN Technologies.

PodZinger is touted by the company to be the fastest, easiest, and most reliable way for users to find information in podcasts. Two unique features of PodZinger make it exceptionally powerful and user-friendly: it displays the text surrounding the search term, so users can skim results the same way they skim text search results to assess relevance quickly; and it allows users to listen to the most relevant sections of their search results by simply clicking on any word in the search result and beginning audio playback from there.

PodZinger searches the Internet each day, and adds new podcasts as they become available. Pocasts are currently being added at the rate of several thousand per week. As the number and content range of available podcasts rapidly expand (fueled in part by traditional media players who are making their content available as RSS series - Really Simple Syndication), there is a growing need for an effective search technology that lets users find specific content they care about. PodZinger meets this need by enabling users to search audio by keyword in the same way they are used to finding what they want with current text search engines.

According to Alex Laats, President, Delta Division, BBN Technologies, ''Relevant and content-rich podcast search is now a reality. At PodZinger, we've used three decades of speech recognition research and development to enable users to search multimedia content as easily as they search text. PodZinger delivers both visual and audio cues for users to gauge relevance in seconds, eliminating the need to listen to an entire segment to find the right nugget of information.''

According to the company, PodZinger is compatible with most popular web browsers, and uses speech-to-text technology to create a text index of the audio, which enables users to find content anywhere within podcasts and jump directly to the point where their keyword is spoken. From the PodZinger site, users can also subscribe to podcasts, download or listen to them, and even have PodZinger automatically deliver new podcasts on their own topics of interest using standard RSS feeds.

To learn more about PodZinger, please visit: www.podzinger.com .

For further information on BBN Technologies, please visit: www.bbn.com .