Profiled: Singingfish
www.singingfish.com
Number of Employees: 30
Founded: 1999

"This is one of the first proof points that there is a significant and growing demand for high-quality audio/video search," Howe commented. "We fully expect to accelerate our query volume from this point forward." She was jubilant about the event, but also pragmatic about the future challenges her company faces. "This is just the tip of the iceberg," she said. She sees more opportunities down the road as more dial-up Internet surfers upgrade to cable modems and DSL and get their appetites whetted for streaming media in the form of music files, short films and movie trailers, news reports, Internet radio, and live events. But she also sees a lot more work ahead.

Singingfish provides multimedia search services that enable Internet users to locate audio and video online. Singingfish is the reigning champion of multimedia search, thanks to being the custodian of the world's largest index of streams (at over 9 million streams). Over the last few years, the company has cataloged and indexed over 30 million streams and downloadable MP3s, with 150,000 to 250,000 more being added weekly.

The First Wave
The Singingfish celebration that followed the 1 million searches milestone is just one of many celebrations the company has had lately. The company has come a long way since its founding in 1999. In the early days, it was a small Seattle startup trolling for clients among Web portals, search and directory sites, broadband service providers, content aggregators, news organizations, entertainment networks, and other online destination sites. It needed to land a couple of whale-sized clients in order to prosper.

Then just months after its 1999 launch (November 2000), the little Singingfish was gleefully gobbled up by one big whale: Thomson. The Paris-based multinational company is the world's fourth-largest producer of consumer electronics and owner of the Thomson, RCA, and Technicolor brand names. Fast on the heels of the Thomson purchase came several impressive client wins: RealNetworks, which resulted in Singingfish search technology being incorporated into the RealOne player; a deal with Sympatico-Lycos, the largest broadband portal in Canada; and a Japanese deal, which put Singingfish on Toshiba's FreshEye site.

Then, this January, Singingfish forged a megadeal with Microsoft that would make them the exclusive multimedia search technology provider for the final version of Windows Media Player 9, as well as for previous versions 7 and 8. Under the agreement, Singingfish would also become the audio and video search provider on WindowsMedia.com.

The Technology
But with the multitude of search options available, why the need for specialized multimedia search technology? Simple: because traditional search engines are text-oriented and don't do a very good job of identifying and indexing audio-visual content. Legacy search engines do provide a sort of "residual" multimedia search, but their depth and relevancy are very limited, and thus they are not very useful to media searchers. Singingfish outperforms legacy search engines by combining a second-generation search architecture and an automated, rule-based classification system.

Singingfish's search service is built on proprietary technologies that include spidering, content metadata extraction, knowledge base technologies, and search and relevance ranking. These technologies support content delivery services and work for the Internet and broadband cable systems. In addition, the company employs a variety of systems used to improve or augment metadata through a process called "auto-annotation." This process employees content-domain experts to develop rules that examine the extracted metadata for information that can be mined and included in the search index. Singingfish boasts that its search results point to valid links 99.9 percent of the time.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, Singingfish calls its spider Asterias, after the scientific name for the starfish family. Asterias is capable of updating the company's streambase quickly enough to capture frequently-changed content like news broadcasts and radio shows. It has been trained to more-often revisit sites that are prone to frequent updates and can be instructed to revisit as often as every 15 minutes.

Improving the Streambase
Among recent causes for celebration, the Microsoft deal probably generated the most jubilance at Singingfish, but Howe, though eternally optimistic, never seems to lose her pragmatic, forward-thinking perspective. "Microsoft isn't the end game," she says.