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By Cynthia Shamel

Remember the 'old days' when search engines couldn't find the content of a PDF? Those days are long gone, and in their place we have an embarrassment of riches. Search engines for non-text media abound, with one list of video search engines alone topping 150. Add to that the image and audio search sites and you've got your hands full. Setting aside the recreational value of non-print media, let's look at some sources that will enhance your ability to find videos, audio and images for competitive intelligence and general business applications.


Beyond Text Search

Finding text-only information will no longer suffice in organisations striving to maintain a competitive edge in the marketplace. Useful business information lies in speeches, product demonstrations, interviews, factory images, product diagrams, photographs and so much more.

Consider this example, based on an actual research project. The goal was to develop insights into the business strategy of a privately held non-US company known for keeping a low profile. Neither the website nor the news or trade literature yielded anything of substance. A search of video sources through YouTube uncovered a 30-minute interview with the CEO conducted at a large financial investment conference. It was a goldmine of information.

Here's another example. The goal was to find an image of a particular aircraft known to be in development. The manufacturer had multiple reasons for keeping the design under wraps, so there was clearly nothing on the website, in journals, magazines, or trade publications. Image searching with multiple specialised search engines lead to an aerial shot captured during a test flight. Mission accomplished.


Multimedia Search Engines

Most business searches will require the use of multiple search engines, as most are specialised to one format or another. I can recommend only one that searches for video, image and audio files. According to its site, SamePoint will search for images, video, and podcasts across tens of thousands of social media sites.

Given the buzz on electronic paper and e-readers such as the Kindle, I did a sample search on epaper. By epaper, we mean the technology used to create displays designed to look like ink on paper and to have the characteristics of paper. Epaper is not backlit like the displays found on computer screens or mobile telephones, so it requires an outside light source to see the 'page.' It is generally lightweight, thin and sometimes flexible.

Note that electronic paper and e-paper are synonyms for epaper and these terms can also be used for comprehensive searching. For our purposes we're going to run some trials using the term epaper since it is simple and mostly unambiguous. In SamePoint, the search produced 3,010 video hits, 93,239 images, and sadly, no podcasts or audio-only files. 


Yahoo!, Google and Live as Multimedia Search Engines

When I started writing this article, the Yahoo! search engine would permit searches limited to video, audio or images and it was actually included with SamePoint in the previous section. By the time you read this, Yahoo! will have disabled its audio search engine (see below). However it, along with Google and Live do facilitate image and video search. To give an idea of scope, search results for epaper are summarised in the following table.

For this article we tested dozens of search engines and have elected to describe those that appeared most suited to business searches. As a result, many perfectly good search tools generally focused on music, television shows and movies are not included here.


Specialised Search Sites for Video

Still in beta, TubeSurf searches YouTube, MySpace Videos, Google Video, and Yahoo! Video. TubeSurf search results are powered by Google, and you could actually search with Google if you want to. Our epaper search would look like this in Google: epaper site:youtube.com OR site:vids.myspace.com OR site:video.google.com OR site:video.yahoo.com. In the TubeSurf box it looks like this: epaper. The Google search produces 1,330 hits. The TubeSurf box produces 461 hits. Exploring the reason for the difference extends beyond the scope of this article, but if you figure it out, let me know.

Hit 1 with Tubesurf

Searchvideo.org makes a bold claim - all online videos - one search engine. The fine print tells us the sites searched include YouTube, Veoh, Grouper, ifilm, Yahoo! Videos, Google Videos, MSN Videos, Metacafe, movie clips, video television and many news outlets videos. It is powered by AOL but not related to or endorsed by AOL. The site offers the opportunity to sort by rank, most recent, most relevant, highest rated and by title. A bar on the left side of the screen groups results by source, category and tag. So, with our epaper search, we see that 158 of the 234 videos come from YouTube. Sixty-six are in the technology category and 15 are news. This functionality makes Searchvideo a useful option.

Hit 1 in Searchvideo.org after sorting for Most Relevant

Blinkx is a popular and well known search engine for videos. Founded in 2004, the search engine claims to be the largest and most advanced, including over 35 million hours of video. Its search technology was conceived at Cambridge University and is protected by over 100 patents. The epaper search yields 346 hits. The first 10 come from a variety of sources including blip.tv, Web Video, YouTube, BBC News, All 5 Min Videos and Reuters. The results include an active thumbnail showing the first few seconds of the video.

Hit 1 from Blinkx after sorting by Relevance

For the local search option, try Yidio based in San Diego, California, USA. This search engine features Internet TV and online videos, as well as local news.  Search results are transparent in that they include a still view of the video content, the date added, runtime, the number of views, the assigned category and source (channel), as well as tags or assigned terms. With one click you can sort by date or highest rated. The epaper search yields 234 hits.

The value here lies in the local search option. Searches can be limited to a specific local news sources in many US cities, as well as SKY News, CNN, and BBC.

Hit 3 from Yidio

Videosurf offers searching within videos. According to its website, Videosurf uses a unique combination of new computer vision and fast computation methods, to 'see' inside videos to find content in a fast, efficient, and scalable way. Although epaper yields only 67 matches, they appear to include videos not found elsewhere. The results show a still shot along with a 'highlights' reel that permits you to jump into the video at a spot that looks interesting or relevant.

Hit 1 from Videosurf

Specialised Search Sites for Audio

Music clearly dominates the audio file category on the Internet, and a recent change at Yahoo! illuminates that fact. According to a notice first seen on Sunday, April 19, Audio Search will close on April 21^st 2009. Yahoo thanks us for using the product and says 'You can continue to find the music you are looking for on Yahoo! Music.' That clearly points toward the dominance of music in Internet audio files.

Of all the audio search tools I tried, the PodcastDirectory seemed to be the most useful. According to the site it 'scours thousands of podcasts daily to build an easy-to-use directory to the works podcasters are creating'. The result lists shows the source, date, length and the beginning of the content. The PodcastDirectory did not return any useful results on epaper, but electronic paper proved fruitful.

Hit 4 from PodcastDirectory

The Internet Archive collects audio files, and it has categorised them into sub-collections. Categories include News & Public Affairs with 6,034 items, Non-English Audio with 561 items, and Open Source Audio with 235,551 items. The Podcasts sub-collection contains 1,851 items.

History.com contains a collection of speeches searchable by keyword. Categories include Presidential Speeches & Audio, Audio Clips from American History, Audio Clips from World History, Military Speeches & Audio, Cultural Speeches & Audio and Scientific Speeches & Audio.

Note that Podscope was not included in the list of recommended sites, in spite of the fact it has been long recommended as the one tool that searches the words within a podcast and not just the tags and titles. Podscope did not return any results for our epaper search or any synonyms including ereader, electronic ink, e-ink, and electronic paper. Podscope appears to be stalled in its development. The copyright date on the page footer is 2005 and the latest blog entries are from 2006. 

Specialised Search Engines for Image Search

Icerocket is probably best known as a blog search engine, but it also offers an excellent image search tool. The epaper image search produced 388 hits. The results are mixed but probably worth going after. The first page shows 40 images, but less than half of those appear relevant. Nevertheless, the relevant ones are interesting.

Fig 7.

Flickr, owned by Yahoo, is a very well known photo-sharing site, so it's a good place to turn for image searches. In addition to the millions of photos uploaded by users, Flickr is partnering with Getty Image for its stock photo library. Be sure to check the copyright and intellectual property policy when you seek to use images found on Flickr, or any of these sites. How does Flickr do with our epaper search? Flickr returned 636 hits which can be sorted by most relevant, most recent, and most interesting.

Fig 8.

Picsearch, based in Stockholm (Sweden), searches over 3 billion images. According to the site the search results will link to third party sources, but it's not transparent what those sources are. We do know that searches can be limited by images or animations, colour or black and white and by size or shape. The epaper search yielded 107,121 images, but duplicates abound as the same image is delivered in various sizes. Nevertheless, images appeared here that I did not see at the top of any other search results list.

Fig 9.

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. Submit an image and TinEye will try to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. On its website, TinEye admits that its search index is very small, but it is growing. Our epaper search is not really suited to this search engine, so instead I uploaded the logo image for Diigo, the social bookmarking site. TinEye searched over 1 billion images and returned 13 results. I found out that the Diigo image appears on several blogs from around the world. Interestingly, the Diigo website did not appear in our results list.

I also searched on the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP) logo.

TinEye offered four results that were interesting but off target, not even including the AIIP website among the hits.

TinEye may not be the answer to your research prayers, but it bears watching.

Time to Play

I found the following three search sites fun, but not necessarily well suited to business searching. In any case, I encourage you to explore these sites. They are entertaining and bear watching.

Picollator says it is the sole web and multimedia search and indexing engine which understands digital images like people do it in real life. Picollator scans the Internet, collects digital pictures and makes the index, matching visual objects in the images by pattern recognition. Picollator finds what a user wants with or without the words. This tool offers a capability similar to TinEye but it focuses on faces. I searched on my own face as it appears on the Shamel Information Services website. First page hits included pictures of the lovely Shania Twain and a rugged Texas college instructor named William.

Titomo delivers a visual image search technology that allows users to find similar images to the ones they have already selected. It draws on the Flickr database of photos and matches colours, themes and subjects. Titomo is extremely visual and hard to describe in words. Try it. It's fun.

Findsounds makes sound effects searchable. Here's where you can find bells and whistles for your dog and pony show.

Directories

For directories of media search engines or sites, try the Digital Librarian, Yahoo! Directory, About.com audio search, image search and video search.

Some of the best places to find listings of specialised search engines are the search engine optimisation (SEO) sites. For instance, the list of over 150 video search engines mentioned above comes from ReelSEO which we found posted to the Slideshare site at http://digbig.com/4yqdr.

By Cynthia Shamel

Written by Cindy Shamel

FUMSI articles by Cynthia Shamel »

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