Singingfish
| Company type | Subsidiary of AOL |
|---|---|
| Industry | Internet Search |
| Founded | 1999, acquired by Thomson SA in 2000, by AOL in 2003 |
| Headquarters | Seattle, WA |
Number of employees | Unknown |
| Website | www.singingfish.com |
Singingfish is an audio/video search engine that powers 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 is one of the earliest and longest lived search engines dedicated to multimedia content. It is sometimes mistakenly referred to as "Singing Fish".
Singingfish employs 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 is 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. As of May 2006, Singingfish's index had about 16 million live audio and video files, not including dead links, which are automatically removed from the index.
The company also accepts partner feeds that allow content providers to add content to Singingfish's index as soon as the content is published and with more complete metadata to improve the chances of the content being found.
History
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 behind the scenes. As of this writing (August 2006), Singingfish continues to power multimedia search for both Microsoft and Real, and is fully integrated into the AOL search and directed media business unit.
Features
Supported Formats
- MP3
- MPEG
- Quicktime
- Windows Media
- Real Media
- Flash
- AVI
Partner Feeds
The content providers below add 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 enable 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
Trivia
Because Singingfish burst 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.
