Search Engines • Buzzsonic.com

Archive for the "Search Engines" Category

Apr14

Podcasts Get Their Own Search Engine

Posted at 1:12 AM • No Comments

Fairfield, Connecticut based TV Eyes, the real-time broadcast search provider which has been indexing television and radio broadcasts since 1999, will debut a Podcast search engine called Podscope later this month. Every word within an Internet podcast will be made searchable which is equally applicable to video blogs and personal videos. Podscope will crawl the web to look for podcasts, when it finds one, it will create an index against every word within the content. Podcasters are also able to submit url(s) for crawling.

“With a looming explosion in such user generated rich content as Podcasts and video blogs, there is a growing need to empower consumers to find and subscribe to programs that meet their diverse interests, commented Allen Weiner, Vice President and Research Director at Gartner. “Searching and indexing these varied audio and video programs will not only benefit content-hungry consumers, it also adds legitimacy and velocity to this burgeoning space.

Podscope isn’t the first speech recognition search technology. HP’s Speechbot has been online for years in demo form using speech-recognition technology to create a searchable transcript. BlinkxTV which we featured here last December also uses speech-recognition technology to create searchable text transcripts.

Related Links

Podscope: New Search Engine Will Allow You to Keyword Search Every Word Spoken in a Podcast [SearchEngineWatch Blog]
Pod Catch [PodCatch.com]
BBC To Massively Expand Podcast Trials [iLoveRadio.org]
Podcast Lab [PodcastLab.com]
Podcast Alley [PodcastAlley.com]
Busy Podcasters Guide [iPodder Sourceforge]
Podcasting (aka How To Get Podcasts and Also Make Your Own) [Engadget.com]
Podcasting Power [MercuryNews.com]
A Look At Other Video Search Tools [SearchEngineWatch.com]

Apr11

Google or Yahoo ?

Posted at 1:30 AM • No Comments

There’s seems to be a split amongst the search engine cognoscenti as to wether Google has lost its crown to Yahoo, now that the expanding search giant has pulled up its socks with the purchase (in December 2002) and fine tuning of Inktomi. Here we’re not so sure as we tend to use both and keep an eye on the newly tweaked MSN Search too.

Still, Norwegian Asgeir S. Nilsen started search engine forums gossiping at the beginning of the month with an April fools joke that has taken on a life of its own. YahGooHoo!gle started as a post on geek news bible Slashdot announcing a Yahoo/Google merger.

The search site actually could be the answer to many web researchers prayers, comparing search results between the two market leaders and splitting the results across a framed results page. How long the site stays up without Yahoo and/or Google pulling the plug or setting the legal bulldogs onto the useful comparison site is anybody guess.

Related Search Resources

YaGoohoo!gle Blog [Yagoohoogle.com]
Comparing Google and Yahoo Search Results [Langreiter.com]
Search Wars are About to Get Personal [CNet News]
GoogleGuy [Googleguy.de]
Google vs Yahoo, the War of the Search Engines [MSNBC.com]
Search Engine Watch [SearchEngineWatch.com]

Dec16

Yahoo And Blinkx Launch New Video Search Options

Posted at 7:15 PM • No Comments

Not one but two new search options for video content on the web were unveiled today only hours apart of each other. First out of the blocks was a “test phase” version of the previously hinted at Yahoo video search. The site went up on Wednesday and competes against pioneers like the AOL owned Singing Fish which was recently upgraded.

The Yahoo video search service lets users narrow their query results by file formats, such as AVI, MPEG, QuickTime, Windows Media and Real, by size and by duration (less or more than a minute). Users can also choose to filter results based on Internet top-level domains, so only results from .com Web sites would be listed, for example. Users can also choose to filter content unsuitable for minors from the search results.

Yahoo search executive Jeremy Zawodny had more to say on the company weblog. Why video? “The costs of producing video content have been steadily decreasing in recent years. Between the adoption of broadband Internet connections, and easier to use video editing software, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing a lot more video content make its way on to the Internet. And what’s out there today is just the tip of the iceberg.”

He continues to explain: “It’s often not easy for a web crawler to find downloadable and streaming video content. Unlike web images and most audio files, videos aren’t always easy to discover. When we started thinking about how to make it easier for anyone to expose video and other rich media content, one of the first things we thought of was podcasting and RSS. Podcasting uses RSS Enclosures to provide an audio file along with a news item or blog posting in an RSS feed. At the most basic level, this (new search option) is just a matter of pointing to a video instead of an MP3 file.”

Search results show a thumbnail of the video, the name of the file, screen size, length in seconds, and size in MB with 20 results per page by default (though this is customizable from 10-100).

Video search is nothing new, the Yahoo owned Alta Vista and All The Web search engines have offered a video search option for years though the technology has improved. Yahoo are now deploying a method called “Media RSS”.

Media RSS is a new RSS module that supplements the enclosure capabilities of RSS 2.0. Enclosures in RSS are already being used to syndicate audio files (Podcasting) and images. Media RSS extends enclosures to handle other media types, such as short films or TV, in addition to providing additional metadata with the media.

Only hours later Blinkx released the Beta version of Blinkx TV, which allows you to search the web for video and audio clips. Blinkx had previously been known for its downloadable desktop search app which actually beat Google’s similar offering to market in the summer. According to media sources search giant Google is courting broadcasters and cable networks with a new technology that would do for television what it has already done for the Internet: sort through and reveal needles of video clips from within the haystack archives of major network TV shows. Microsoft is also developing a search engine for video.

Blog search engine Blogdigger recently revealed a media search option on their site, enabling users to specify media files in five different classes: audio:, video:, image:, torrent: and text ( a catch all including things like PDF, ZIP or Microsoft Word documents) that Blogdigger indexes from the RSS feeds used on blogs like us here at MBN24. Both Compaq and IBM have been working low key on multimedia search options for a while now too.

Related Reading

Yahoo Launches Video Search, New RSS Format [ResearchBuzz.com]
Blinkx Unveils Video Search Engine [CNet News]
Striking up Digital Video Search [CNet News]
At Yahoo, Signs Point to a Bigger Media Move [CNet News]
Search Meets TV [SearchEngineWatch.com]
TV and Search Merge [BattelleMedia.com]
AOL Revamps SingingFish Audio Video Search [MusicbizNews24.com]
Google Audio Search [Oristus.com]

Dec2

AOL Revamps Singingfish Audio Video Search

Posted at 11:48 PM • No Comments

In reaction to rumours that search leaders Google, along with Yahoo and MSN were busy improving the multimedia search capabilities of their own search engines Time Warner’s AOL announced that they had improved the service of their Singingfish audio video search engine to cater for the increasing user base of their year old acquisition.

Singingfish, which until now has remained backstage and focused on licensing its technology to other companies, will move toward the spotlight to position itself as a player in the multimedia search space. “We’re introducing Singingfish as a destination site for the first time,” said Karen Howe, Singingfish’s vice president and general manager.

Singingfish wants to attract feedback from users and learn from usage patterns in order to take that insight and base multimedia search innovations on it, she said. “We want to push the envelope over what you can do with audio and video search,” she said in an interview with Digit Online.

According to AOL, search queries had risen dramatically from a few thousand to around 700,000 per day and they are indexing around 14 million multimedia files in various formats (both streaming and normal) like Windows Media, Real Audio, QuickTime and MP3. This figure doesn’t take into account the queries Singingfish technology handles for clients such as Microsoft and RealNetworks, which if counted would increase the volume to about 7 million queries per day.

Older alternatives like AltaVista and AllTheWeb have offered advanced audio-video search options for a few years now and are both owned by Yahoo though they both may well be integrated into Yahoo’s Inktomi search results in the future.

AOL bought Seattle based SingingFish from Paris-based consumer electronics company Thomson in November 2003 for an undisclosed amount. Thomson, famously, alongside the German based Fraunhofer were behind the development of the MP3 format. .

Related Reading

SingingFish Pushes Multi Media Search [DigitMag.co.uk]
SingingFish Unveils MultiMedia Search Tool [PCWorld.com]
Singingfish Floats New Multimedia Search [InternetNews.com]
Google is Listening:Searching Audio [Forret.com]
Legal Download Search Engine GoFish to Launch Monday [MusicbizNews24.com]
Striking up Digital Video Search [CNetNews]
Google Audio Search [Oristus.com]
AOL Buys Singingfish, Rolls Out More Search Changes [SearchEngineNews.com]
Lycos MultiMedia Search [Lycos.com]
Exploseek [Exploseek.com]
the Bit Torrent File Search Engine [Yotoshi.com]

Nov27

Legal Download Search Engine GoFish to Launch Monday

Posted at 12:26 AM • No Comments

A new search engine launches Monday (November 29th) aimed at helping potential buyers find legal digital content across the growing number of legal download services. In essence GoFish.com is another shopping metasearcher though with a narrower target. It fetches feeds from merchants’ media catalogues, indexes them and makes them searchable. The company is getting feeds from iTunes, Napster, Musicmatch, eMusic, Streamwaves and a host of other online merchants, allowing users to search across all the services from one place. The site also looks for audiobooks, video, ring tones and games.

San Francisco based GoFish, was started by Michael Downing, founder of the ill-fated “music locker” service Musicbank.com. Musicbank was originally designed to compete with (pre-Universal and CNet) MP3.com’s streaming locker service — known as My.Mp3.com — that allowed users to stream music from a database of music the company stored on its servers. Downing sold his music-player software company Sonique to Lycos in 2000.

GoFish will make a 9 percent to 15 percent commission from merchants for every sale it sends their way. The site also will earn commissions when users sign up for monthly music subscription services offered by Napster and other online stores. Given the already wafer thin margins operated by merchants its hard to see anyone getting rich from that revenue model though the company are pinning their hopes on licensing out the technology to other websites and search engines.

Downing said he already has talked with most search engines about partnerships and hopes to announce a deal before the end of the year. In an interview with the Mercury News he said the prospective partnership is with a second-tier search engine rather than a top site like Google or Yahoo.

In the sparse detail on the GoFish website they report to have indexed 12 million media files and claim to be the largest, deepest reaching, and most expansive search platform for digital media in the world. If the project sounds alarmingly familiar, late last year SingingFish.com another audio video search specialist from Seattle sold out to AOL for an undisclosed sum. Though Singing Fish relies on their own indexing technology rather than plugging into third party databases and also outsources the search service.

Related Reading

Fishing For Music With GoFish [SiliconBeat.com]
Napster, My.MP3.com, Digital Music, and the Future [NetFreedom.org]
Musicbank Calls it Quits [Wired.com]
Eric Gibb’s Musicbank Portfolio [Chromatic.net]
Musicbanks CEO: Hitting the Right Notes [BusinessWeek.com]
Singingfish Grows As Multimedia Search Provider [SearchEngineWatch.com]