Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Ithaki
Ithaki (ithaki.net/multimedia/) is a meta-search engine that ofers several
diferent types of searches, including MP3 and MIDI iles. You don't get any
search options for its MP3 search beyond keywords, but I ind that Ithaki
inds a limited and ultimately monitorable set of results. If you want to trap
for a more general keyword, like a musical genre, start here. Again, you
have to use a page monitor; no RSS feeds or e-mail alerts are available.
Google's Song Search
Remember how I noted earlier in the chapter that there was one way to
directly search for audio content on Google without noodling around with
special syntax? his is it—sort of. If your audio interest is in music, you
might ind this search useful.
here isn't a direct URL for using this feature. Instead, you start your search
on Google. Search for a musician name, band name, or song name. If Google
matches it (and in my experience it sometimes misses; Google doesn't have
music results for all musicians), a band name and more information dis-
plays at the top of the page. From there, you can drill down into more music
results for musicians, album names, and even song names.
his service is of limited usefulness for an information trapper. If you want
to monitor a musician for new releases, Amazon's a much better way to go.
But if you wanted to do something really obeat like watch for songs with
a certain keyword in the title, you could do it using Google's Song Search
and a page monitor.
AltaVista Audio Search
If you're an old-school Internet searcher, you might be raising an eye-
brow—who in the world uses AltaVista nowadays? Everybody still uses it for
Babelish, and I recommend also using it for the audio search (altavista.com/
audio/default). As you can see from the front page, you can specify several
diferent types of audio, from MP3, to Real, to AIFF. You can also ilter your
searches by audio lasting more or less than a minute. I recommend you search
for more than a minute to avoid song clips. Search results aren't available in
RSS feeds, darn it, but at least you can get 50 results to a page and monitor
that. To get 50 results at a time, visit AltaVista's Web search at AltaVista.com
and change the settings to 50 results per page ( Figure 8.2 ).
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