July 14, 2004

Google is said to developing a new feature, allowing users to search the Web for video and audio clips.

The company has yet to announce plans for the new service, but Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page made no secret of it during talks with investors and media executives at an annual retreat hosted by investment bank Allen & Co. in Sun Valley, Idaho.

A Google spokeswoman said she couldn't confirm the plan. As it prepares for its highly anticipated $2.7 billion initial public stock sale this year, Google has been seeking to diversify and expand its offerings amid heightened competition from the likes of Yahoo! and Microsoft.

The search engines are announcing new features almost daily in a race to capture bigger audiences and more advertising dollars. In particular, they are competing for a growing segment of consumers armed with faster "broadband" Internet connections who are driving demand for multimedia content that moves beyond plain text.

When it comes to multimedia searches, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google trails some of its competitors.

Yahoo's AltaVista, one of the oldest search engines, already allows users to search for audio and video. Time Warner's AOL, which has paid-search partnership with Google, bought Singingfish earlier this year in a move to offer multimedia search capabilities.

In the past, Google and other search engines have expressed some trepidation about listing audio and video files because of legal concerns that some of the content may have been illegally copied and downloaded.

Google may decide to take its search function one step further by tapping into the growing popularity of legal music downloading. For instance, it could strike partnerships with record companies, which would sponsor links to legitimate song files available for downloading.

Another route would be for Google to host music files on its own site, allowing it to establish an online music business similar to Apple's iTunes service.

"One of the things I think they would try to do is take a new leadership role by rolling out an audio and video search function that is different," said Danny Sullivan, editor of searchenginewatch.com.

"You can't ignore it — there is tons of money to be made off of music."

So far, Google's forays into multimedia have been limited to audio clips from National Public Radio. Google News, which links to stories from news outlets around the world, features clips from such NPR shows as "Talk of the Nation" and "Fresh Air."

Source: NY Post

        

Read Serge Thibodeau's daily blogs on search engines at Serge Thibodeau Live. We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.