• by Betsy , Joel Gehman , March 14, 2005

Lately I've been watching an interesting convergence. In relatively short order, the search engines have begun ramping up various rich media indexing capabilities (a.k.a. multimedia search). Consumer demand for multimedia content is partly driving the trend. And with growth in paid search projected to slow from 174 percent in 2003 to 18 percent in 2006, search engines are likewise hungry for new markets. Let's meet the major players.

AltaVista Video: Fittingly, AltaVista was the first search engine to offer audio and video search capabilities. You may recall that AltaVista became a part of Yahoo! through its Overture acquisition in July 2003. These days, Yahoo! Video Search powers AltaVista and AllTheWeb.

MSN Video: Redmond's silence has only fueled speculation. The site appears to be a work in progress, with a few unique touches. For example, when my search for 'johnny cash' produced zero results I tried 'diet' instead, which had fourteen results. I clicked on Low-Carb Spaghetti Squash. After watching an ad for Post Honey Bunches of Oats, I was treated to a short Food Network cooking segment (followed by a movie trailer for Upside of Anger). Overall MSN Video streamed 60 million clips in January 2005.

Singingfish: On November 17, 2004, AOL acquired Singingfish as part of its effort to attract and retain broadband users. Following the acquisition, Singingfish launched a paid inclusion program ($49 for the first file indexed). It claims 5 million searches a day from distribution partners including AOL, RealOne, and WindowsMedia. Some 73 percent of Singingfish users perform at least 3 queries per session, and nearly 45 percent perform over 5 searches per visit.

Yahoo! Video Search: On December 15, 2004, Yahoo! launched a beta of its video search engine. A month later Video Search was added to the home page. Its interface allows for advanced searching by format (e.g., .avi, .mpg, .ram, .wmv, etc), relative file size, duration, and domain. Overall the service is very satisfying. For example, a search for 'johnny cash' returned a collection of 72 relevant results, though admittedly many were simply different file formats of his popular cover of "Hurt."

Because lots of rich media files are hidden behind crawler thwarting obstacles, Yahoo! also developed Media RSS, to make finding and crawling this type of content easier. While today Yahoo! indexes metadata it has also announced a partnership with TVEyes which will provide transcript searching a la Google Video.

Blinkx.tv: Hours after Yahoo! launched its video search offering Blinkx.tv was announced. Also in beta, Blinkx.tv works by capturing and storing video and audio from television and radio broadcasts. It then uses speech recognition technology to create a searchable transcript of each broadcast. Current sources include BBC, Bloomberg, Fox News, and NPR. While this sounds promising, my search for 'johnny cash' returned a mostly irrelevant set of results.

Google Video: After indexing closed captioning text for about a month, Google Video launched on January 25, 2005. The service covers only a handful of channels. At this point no video clips are indexed, but rather transcript snippets along with video stills. For this reason the current experience might be better dubbed "Google TV." Despite its currently thin offering, by all accounts Google's plans are the most ambitious.

Given the relatively small index, results can be hit or miss. My 'johnny cash' search revealed a very different result set. In situations where you hit, the "About This Show" information proves useful. Of course if you're looking for a channel guide, consider Yahoo! TV.

By no means is this a comprehensive roundup. Lycos has a seemingly forgotten multimedia search feature. And there are other specialized video search tools.

Overall, Yahoo! Video Search provides the most robust offering today. For example on a search for 'the' Yahoo! indexes nearly 1 million videos. It also has the benefit of exposure on the Yahoo! home page, plus distribution via AltaVista and AllTheWeb. Its decision to enhance the existing RSS standard is also winning fans. Singingfish is probably the most aggressive in trying to monetize its audience. At just under 800,000 results, its index is robust. Singingfish also has the benefit of good distribution. Interestingly both engines have taken a very similar approach to finding and indexing content.

In contrast, Blinkx and Google are both trying to solve the problem through transcription, but from a depth and relevance standpoint their results don't yet measure up. For example, Google may have a mere 10,000 television programs indexed. Finally, MSN Video is better thought of as a directory to a relatively narrow set of commercial content.

As exciting as the last three months have been, I expect even more announcements in the months ahead, so stay tuned...