In the relentless heavyweight battle for market shares, Yahoo Inc. is set to introduce a tool to help consumers search the growing "podcast" industry.

In an effort to provide the public with a free service to wade through the tens of thousands of podcasts now available on the web, Yahoo will help consumers find and organize the audio programsconsistent with respective personal interests. Industry experts believe that text searching on the Internetmay havereached a saturation point so the future of search growth is in the audio and video sector.

In an effort to attract consumers to specific search engines so as to obtain the profitable ad sales associated with high traffic, the search engine companies are continuing to add more "bells and whistles" to their products. Yahoo has estimated that as many as five million people currently listen to podcasts available on the internet, but that at the same time, the podcast concept is still a mystery to a large sector of the country. Offering a free service to make podcasting more accessible to the consumer will open the market to a number of new customers and subsequently new advertising revenue options.

Though Apple has sold more than 20 million iPods nationally, Yahoo believes its search concept will also increase accessibility for consumers by enabling users to store the podcasts on their home computer's music players.