Recently I ran across a new multimedia search engine I had hadn't heard of before: singingfish.com This search engine scours the web hourly looking for streaming feeds as well as regular QuickTime and other multimedia files. They claim to have over 8 million streaming feeds in their index, surely a remarkable number.
The spider seems to be able to parse qualities of the stream or multimedia file and display them in the search results. For instance, one of my Wrinkle in Time panos used sound and it displayed a speaker next to that entry. To the right of the search result there are icons showing the format, and a stream bitrate (or filesize if it is not a stream).
After typing in VirtualParks into the search field, I noticed that clicking on a movie from VirtualParks brought up the movie all by itself, stripped of all HTML EMBED commands and textual context. Would this make it easier for pirates to find stuff to steal? Perhaps, but it clearly makes it easier to find streaming programs (which are much harder to digitally duplicate than your average standalone .mov file).
Oddly, every single item has a "Shop now" button which takes you to Amazon's site and does a search on the keyword, even if the item in question has no commercial product available. Perhaps this is a defense against the argument that they are facilitating piracy (of MP3 files which is usually unapproved copies).
The advanced search allows you to narrow the results to only QuickTime, Real, MP3, or WMP. Their site says they offer a service where you can add a multimedia search
field to your site, no doubt for a fee. singingfish is owned by Thomson Multimedia.
10:28:12 PM
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