Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Despite the huge strides in Internet-based multimedia, it's easiest for search
engines to index text-based information, so that's what's easiest to ind.
However, several companies have made huge strides in the development
and deployment of multimedia search engines, especially in the past year.
here are several reasons to want to keep up with the latest cool podcasts or
the newest audio or the latest video. Many blogs have turned to providing
an audio or video format (especially corporate and marketing blogs), and
video online has exploded in the last year. For example, sites like YouTube
and Yahoo Video have been indexing thousands of hours of content.
You can track multimedia with traps, but you have to do it in a roundabout
way, speciically by starting your multimedia search using general, text-
based search engines! Ater that, you can go for speciic multimedia sites in
a variety of categories, from audio, to photos, to video.
Searching Audio
Why would you want to trap audio? he variety of audio content that's
indexed and available online is almost as varied as the kind of text content.
here's music, of course, but there are also podcasts (like talk shows, with
a huge variety of topics), instructional audio, conference calls, interviews,
and more. Even if you're not sure if your topic would be served by trapping
for audio, at least try a few queries at the resources we cover here, and see
what you ind. You might change your mind! We'll start by using Google's
regular search engine to ind audio, speciically MP3s.
Using general search engines
hough it's unlikely that you'll ind actual ready-to-play multimedia in
Google's Web search results (except for one resource which we look at a
little later in the chapter), you can ind pointers to multimedia. It just takes
a little search tweaking and a special syntax we haven't looked at yet.
I'm referring to the iletype syntax. Filetype inds pages that have a speciied
string at the end. Searching for iletype:mp3 yields MP3 iles that have been
indexed by Google. To narrow your results, you must use very broad key-
words (such as reggae , rock , meta l, “Dance Dance Revolution” , etc.). Using
 
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