Singingfish
 |
|
| Subsidiary of AOL | |
| Industry | Internet Search |
| Fate | Acquired |
| Founded | 1999, acquired by Thomson SA in 2000, by AOL in 2003 |
| Defunct | Feb 2007 |
| Headquarters | Seattle, WA |
|
Number of employees
|
over 50 |
| Website | www.singingfish.com |
Singingfish was an audio/video search engine that powered audio video search for Windows Media Player, WindowsMedia.com, RealOne/RealPlayer, Real Guide,AOL Search, Dogpile, Metacrawler 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 all web hits from RMC TV to Singingfish were being redirected to AOL Video and as of February 2007 Singingfish had 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 and is now being re-directed to AOL Video Search.
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 50,000 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. Many of the multimedia URLs used as seeds for Singingfish's crawlers and annotation engines came from cache logs from the NSF-funded National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR) IRCache Web Caching project.
Singingfish was founded in mid-1999 by John DeRosa, Eric Rehm, Ken Berkun, and Mike Behlke.
By January 2000, it had grown 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.
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