By
Danny
Sullivan, Editor
The multimedia
search engines listed below will help you locate sound, image and video files
-- as well as radio and television programs.
Images/Audio/Video
- Radio
& TV Programs - Related
Articles
AllTheWeb
http://www.alltheweb.com/
Find images
from across the web, as gathered by the AllTheWeb crawler. To image search,
select the "Pictures" tab above the search box. To find video files,
use the "Video" tab. Choose the "Audio" tab to find MP3 and
other sound files.
AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com/
Find images,
audio and video from across the web, as discovered by AltaVista's crawler
technology. To image search, select the "Image" tab above the search
box. For audio and MP3 files, use the "MP3/Audio" tab. For video,
select the "Video" tab.
Ditto (images only)
http://www.ditto.com/
Search or
browse to find pictures on the web. Matches are displayed in thumbnail format.
Formerly known as Arriba Vista.
Google
Images (images
only)
http://images.google.com
Find images
from across the web, as discovered by Google's crawler-technology.
Kazaa Media
Desktop
(MP3 only)
http://www.kazaa.com/
Kazaa is
widely acknowledged as the leading MP3 search and download service. Rather than
crawling the web to gather music listings, Kazaa lets you search against a
collection of music files that other Kazaa users contribute. That's a great
system for all those MP3 searchers who are after free music downloads and who
aren't concerned about copyright restrictions. (For legal issues involved, see
the Nov. 2002 article from Wired, The Race to Kill
Kazaa)
Lycos
Pictures and Sounds
http://multimedia.lycos.com/
The Lycos
multimedia search service. Lets you find pictures from licensed collections and
from across the web. Also provides options to search for audio & MP3 files,
as well as video clips.
http://www.musicrobot.com/
Allows you to
search for
The Music
Finder (artists
& songs, not files)
http://www.music-finder.net/
Enter some
bands or music artists, and the Music Finder will suggest others you may wish
to consider. The search engine has a database of over 13,000 bands and artists.
Picsearch (images only)
http://www.picsearch.com/
Presents image
results from across the web.
Singingfish (audio/video only)
http://www.singingfish.com/
Singingfish
lets you locate audio or video files from across the web, through its own crawling
activity and partnership with sites that provide feeds through free and paid
deals. Singingfish lets you locate MP3 music files, as well as QuickTime,
RealMedia and Windows Media files, as well. These formats are used to record
content such as movie trailers, sporting events highlights, live music events,
video news clips and more. (Review: Singingfish
Grows As Multimedia Search Provider,
SpeechBot
http://speechbot.research.compaq.com/
Great service
that lets you search through the audio files of popular
PublicRadioFan.Com
http://www.publicradiofan.com/
A customizable
web site that provides one-click access to public radio programming from around
the world. (Review: Listen to the
World,
Radio-Locator
http://www.radio-locator.com/
A searchable
database of over 10,000 radio station web pages and 2,500 audio streams. This
directory was formerly called the MIT List of Radio Stations on the Internet.
TheFeedRoom
http://www.feedroom.com/
View segments
from local television newscasts on your computer. A searchable database of
current stories is available. May not load if you block cookies, lack Flash or
other browser components (see FAQ).
Images Get
Their Own Search Engine
Forbes,
http://www.forbes.com/infoimaging/2004/05/04/cx_pp_0504visualsearch_ii.html
Profile of new
technology from Pixlogic which is designed to let you search for images based
on what it has indexed from the image information, rather than from text
describing the images. In other words, unlike typical image search engines, it
really can "see" what the image is about.
Search gets
sketchy, as engines get the picture
News.com,
http://news.com.com/2100-1038-5182775.html
Draw a
picture, get matching image search results. That's the hope of an experimental
search engine at
Researchers
Hope to Improve Web Searches
AP,
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/7028470.htm
The Grammar
of Sound
Technology Review,
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_harney043003.asp
Need to search
through audio recordings to find particular keyword references? New technology
from Fast-Talk Communications aims to
make this much easier. Of course, SpeechBot (above) has
allowed you to do this for ages for selected news content. The service either
lets you search against written transcripts to match portions of audio
recordings or has used speech recognition to create transcripts where none are
available. However, FAST-Talk skips the transcription step used by SpeechBot
and other audio-indexing companies. Instead, it makes a sound -- rather than
word -- transcription of a document. This is supposed to speed the indexing
process.
Searching
Images of Popular Culture
SearchDay,
April 14, 2003
http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/2189791
Want a look at
a Time Magazine cover from 1923? How about album covers for Blue Note records,
or Chateau Mouton Rothschild Wine Labels? A searchable image database lets you
view all of these, and more.
A Review of
Image Search Engines
TASI,
Feb. 2003
http://www.tasi.ac.uk/resources/searchengines.html
Comprehensive
look at finding images online.
Searching
Inside Of Images
The
Search Engine Report, Dec. 4, 2000
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2163241
Roundup of
players who were hoping to advance image search but failed to survive the
dotcom downturn. Also describes the problem most image search engines have --
the inability to actually "see" inside of images.