Google is trialling an image search function, AltaVista had an image search for years before it added its video and MP3 search functions – now Yahoo is looking to bring it’s own powerful multimedia search engine to the internet.
Yahoo will be kicking off with some great content, including the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and audio files from National Public Radio.
The company is looking to make money by charging commercial content providers for including their material in its database; non-commercial entities can submit their content free.
Microsoft are working on their own multimedia search engine, and that should be interesting given how much they like tampering with search results to suit themselves – try doing a search for Xfree86, an open source window system for UNIX and UNIX-based systems on MSN.
AltaVista – useful, but different media types are not searchable from the same page