Yahoo Brings Audio and Video Together in Searches

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.

Google Image Search

AltaVista – useful, but different media types are not searchable from the same page

XFree86 on MSN

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?