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Singingfish
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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| Fate | Acquired |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1999, acquired by Thomson SA in 2000, by AOL in 2003 |
| Defunct | Feb 2007 |
| Location | Seattle, WA |
| Industry | Internet Search |
| Peak size | over 50 employees |
Singingfish was an audio/video search engine that powered audio video search for Windows Media Player, RealOne / RealPlayer, WindowsMedia.com, AOL Search, Real Guide[1], Dogpile, Metacrawler[2] and Singingfish.com, among others. Launched in 2000, it was one of the earliest and longest lived search engines dedicated to multimedia content. Acquired in 2003 by AOL, it was slowly folded into the AOL search offerings and as of Feb 2007 has ceased to exist as a separate service.
Singingfish powered audio search continues to live on for the time being at AOL Search and other AOL properties. However, little if any development has been done since August 2006. Singingfish powered video search is no longer publicly available.
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Singingfish employed its own web crawler, Asterias, designed specifically to ferret out audio and video links across the web. In 2003 and 2004, Asterias discovered an average of about fifty thousand new pieces of multimedia content a day. A proprietary system was used to process each of the discovered links, extracting metadata and then enhancing it prior to indexing as much multimedia content on the web has little or poor metadata.
Singingfish was founded in mid-1999 by John DeRosa, Eric Rehm, Ken Berkun, and Mike Behlke.
By January of 2000, it grew to 17 employees. The group photo on the left was taken in Singingfish's first office on Seattle's Capitol Hill on January 24, 2000. From left to right: Robin Alexander, Scott Lee, Chris Wilkes, Eric Rehm, Shannon MacRae, Mike Behlke, Mark Lipsky, Linden Rhoads (a non-employee adviser), John Madsen, Charles Porter, Vas Sudanagunta, Paul Shannon, Austin Dahl, Chris Abajian and John DeRosa. Not pictured: Ken Berkun and Monte Hayward.
By the Fall of 2000, Singingfish had grown to over 50 employees. In November of 2000, it was acquired by the French company Thomson Multimedia (now Thomson SA). Singingfish announced its first customer, Zurich-based Internet AG, in December 2000. Singingfish Search first appeared on Internet AG's "Swiss Search" and Infospace's Dogpile and Metacrawler sites late in the summer of 2001.
By this time Singingfish was clearly the dominant multimedia search engine. No competitor indexed as much of the audio and video content available on the web or provided more relevant query results. In the fall of 2001, Real Networks signed a deal with Singingfish for the latter to provide audio and video search for RealOne Player. In January of 2003, Microsoft signed a similar deal, in this case to provide audio and video search for Windows Media Player and WindowsMedia.com.
Singingfish downsized dramatically under Thomson Multimedia (Summer 2001) and then slowly continued to shrink in size through its acquisition by AOL in October 2003.
Soon after acquiring Singingfish, AOL integrated its audio/video search service into AOL Search, adding yet another big-name to the stable of search products powered by Singingfish. As of August 2006, Singingfish continued to power multimedia search for both Microsoft and Real, and was being fully integrated into the AOL search and directed media business unit.
The last members of the Singingfish staff were laid off in December 2006[1]. As of February 7, 2007 all hits to Singingfish on the Internet are being redirected to AOL Video.
The content providers below added their audio and video content to Singingfish's search index using regular feeds. In addition to providing high quality meta data to be indexed, these direct feeds also enabled Singingfish to produce highly current results for news related queries.
- Comedy Central
- MTV
- Nickelodeon
- TV Land
- Reuters
- BBC News
- CBS News
- E! News
- iFilm
- MSNBC
- NPR
- Atom-Films
- CNN
- Hollywood.com
- Like Television
- MarketWatch (Dow Jones & Company)
- The One Network
- RooTV
- AOL
Because Singingfish came onto the scene at about the same time as Big Mouth Billy Bass, many people in 2000 and 2001 assumed that the former was the maker or the name of the latter.
- ^ For queries on Real Guide, Singingfish search results appeared in the section "Audio & Video on the Web". The Singingfish logo was only displayed on the second and later result pages.
- ^ For queries on Dogpile and Metacrawler, results from Singingfish were annotated next to the relevant result(s).
