Take the elevator to the fourth floor of one of the Darth Vader-like black glass buildings in Seattle’s tony Belltown neighborhood and you’ll enter Singingfish territory, mission control for the Internet’s first multi-platform, multimedia search engine, and a virtual media-quarium that houses a vast and ever-expanding directory of digital media stores – from music, audio and motion picture streams to MP3s. Walking about the spacious physical layout of the place, it is clear there is ample room for growth here. That is indeed fortunate because a much bigger tank is something Singingfish may soon need. In fact, Singingfish could very well become a singing whale once it fully engages the new revenue-generating, pay-per-click marketing plan it just introduced at the Boston Search Engine Strategies Conference.
Singingfish CEO Karen Howe, who was brought aboard the company shortly after it was acquired by Thomson Media at the end of 2000, is taking us on a mini-walking tour of the “digital fishery,” pointing out those who inhabit the cubes. Interns from Japan have allowed Singingfish to offer multimedia searching in Kangi. There are the content people. “These guys work on the actual integration of finding the multimedia streams and getting them into the engine. Not only Windows Media and RealNetworks streams but MP3s and A/V files that are Windows Media formats, Quicktime, and Real Audio and Video. (Some are even Java-based). Flash and MPEG-4 are not far off.”
The reality is that there are nearly as many media files on the Net as there are fish in the sea, but scarcely enough time or people to organize them. That’s where the Singingfish algorithms and rules-based filtering come into play, handling an XML-feed from MSNBC, or media coming across from the BBC or RealNetworks. Last stop is engineering on our way into the snackroom where a feverish game of foosball is underway. Could foosball be making a comeback as well?
Like Singingfish, all the emerging players in the search engine biosphere seem to be on the verge of a much bigger payday if the new revenue model that is reshaping the industry as a whole is any indication. The newly adopted “paid inclusion” and “pay-per-click” eco-system which charges Website owners and content providers for featuring links to their content and sending searchers to their sites is the key. The “pay for performance” system allows directories, portals and Website owners to share the wealth generated by clicking on search engine referrals (including matches with much sought after keywords) and should entice search engines like MSN, Google, AOL and others to go ahead and include multimedia content in their search results. After all, the bigger the fish, the bigger the revenue pond could be.
We sat down with Karen Howe to learn more about what makes Singingfish sing with such gusto, and why paid inclusion may very likely be the next chapter in the company’s grand opera.
Seattle24x7: Singingfish must surely be one of the best kept secrets in the search engine world?
Howe: Well, most people do not know that there are some 3700 search engines today. In fact, I would argue that most people have probably heard of Google or AltaVista or perhaps InfoSpace or some others, but probably have yet to realize that searching has become the new killer app. Having audio-video search is just a natural outgrowth of the dominance of search in general.
We kind of see ourselves as the Google of audio-video search. We are also the Switzerland. We can adapt to anybody else’s search engine or search results. You could argue pretty successfully that people might be better served if you gave them mixed results, text and multimedia. For instance, if you did a search on Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, it might be nice if as an end-user you not only saw that you could choose an article or a review, but could also see this multimedia stream. Let the end-user make up their minds about what they want to do. Nobody currently mixes results like that.
Seattle24x7: Why have search engines overlooked including multimedia content?
Howe: It’s really different technology. We were built from the ground up with spiders that extract metadata out of a stream. All a typical text spider has to do is crawl around a page and look at all of the lovely stuff they can pick from. There’s a word here, and a word there. It’s very easy. With streams, it’s not easy. Typically, the metadata that is encoded in the stream is incomplete and so we’ve had to annotate metadata wherever we can, trying to reconstruct or fill in missing gaps. We use third-party databases to do that, because we’re also pretty intelligent about where we spider and how we spider. The end result is a stronger index.
Seattle24x7: How can one search Singingfish content?
Howe: In many ways. For starters, we do our own ranking and relevancy rating of streams. So you’ll see current news over older news, for example. What are you looking for? How long is it? What’s the bit rate? For instance, you can decide to see streams that are two minutes in length and are Windows Media formatted. Do you want to have the family filter on or off? We categorize all streams and, in music, we index a genre of the stream too. You could type in a genre for music like Rock n’ Roll or Zydeco or Jazz.
Seattle24x7: You have cited research that Web searches are best satisfied with audio and video results. What do you mean by that?
Howe: What we’ve discovered is that audio video is more satisfying in terms of what people are looking for. If you look at Google’s top queries for last year, out of the top 20 queries, 12 of them were music. Okay, did you want to see a review of the music? Not really. You wanted to listen to the music. If someone types in Avril Lavigne, theyr’e not just looking for her fan site. And yet a lot of people get confused and think they can get multimedia on Google. You can’t.
Seattle24x7: How does the new revenue sharing model work?
Howe: Let me use an example. There’s a cinema company that has a film that’s out right now that paid us to include a link to that stream in our index on a cost-per-click basis. It’s exclusively pay-for-performance. We don’t guarantee where the stream will show up in the index, we’re just guaranteeing it is in the index. What we will do is that we will work with people on their metadata to make sure it is accurate and that they can be located which will give a natural boost to that stream potentially.
So say someone is looking for a movie for the weekend. They click on Willard. What will happen then is that they will see the movie trailer. And if at that precise moment, they also want to get more information or if they want to get the tickets, or if they want to get the t-shirt, or buy a rat, that landing page is fully customizable by the advertiser.
And so the advertiser gets two impressions at once. They get the stream that is playing and they get the landing page that can very specifically tie back to their content. When I’m done watching the stream, that media box can go away, but now as an end-user I’m still looking at the opportunity to do another activity or get engaged again with the advertiser. In cases like this, I think everybody benefits. I think the end-user benefits because they’ve found something they’re interested in. They’re not going to waste their time, particularly waiting for a stream to load for something that they don’t care about. Our distribution partners benefit because we give them a revenue share, and that percentage can vary.
In order for us to really grow the business we’re just adopting what other search engines have done, which is going to an advertising model.
We’re the only search engine who can take a multimedia stream and turn that into a paid inclusion stream in our index.
Seattle24x7: What are the benefits of promoting multimedia links for the advertiser?
Howe: A stream is a lot more immersive and emotive than a banner ad. A banner ad is essentially direct response marketing but it’s not very targeted. This is highly targeted and, for the first time, an advertiser can think about a branding experience or putting their product into the consideration cycle where it wouldn’t have been before. It’s a different experience online. It’s far more engaging and you’re far more likely to develop a relationship with the end-user at that point where you are never going to get that off a banner ad.
Seattle24x7: This initiative has created a new conversation with the Portal players?
Howe: Before it would’ve been, Hey AOL, hey Yahoo!, Hey MSN, you pay me and I’ll give you multimedia search. And they all say, Love the service, think it’s fantastic, we’ll get right back to you about when we’re going to start that up, which meant they couldn’t monetize it. Now they can! We’re going back and talking about how we can split the revenue out. It’s a pie we can share.
Amazon would be another great potential customer for us. We’d love it if we could get all their four million clips of movies and music. We’d put them into the index and people would know they were clips and not full music.
Yet another potential collaboration could be the motion picture archives of companies like Corbis and Getty Images. I think they should give us their movies, we’ll put them in the index and make them searchable to a wide audience and help them sell subscriptions.
Seattle24x7: You’ve been Swiss-neutral in your media platforms, working with Microsoft on the one hand and Real on the other hand?
Howe: In the player market space, the folks that have won that territory are RealNetworks and Windows Media. There are some other players that are out there as well but that are not as well known. MusicMatch is one, which is subscription only. WinAMP, which is AOL’s property, is another. The role we have in each one of these cases is that of a gateway. Remember, we ‘re just pointing to the streams, not housing them on our site.
Seattle24x7: Of course, there are also countless numbers of smaller sites who also have multimedia content to share?
Howe: I think a lot of the marketing departments within companies will have one or two streams, and they’ll say, Dang it, nobody clicked on them. Well that’s because they were on their Web site. Who knew they were there? But if you put them in a search engine, you’re at least doing your job which is getting the marketing communications out to the public where it can be found.
Seattle24x7: Thanks for talking shop with us Karen. We hope things go swimmingly for Singingfish in the months ahead. [24×7]
Larry Sivitz is the Managing Editor of Seattle24x7.
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