'Advances being made' in media search

12 September 2007

Steps are being made in the development of multimedia search engines capable of effectively tagging, cataloguing and indexing audio and video content, according to TechNewsWorld.

Multimedia searching throws up a whole new set of obstacles compared to that of normal text searching - including that most multimedia content is not subject to the same degree of tagging that allows searches based on metadata.

Despite these challenges, the cofounder of mVisible, an independent digital music distributor, told TechNewsWorld that there are "advances being made" in transcribing content from audio and video so it is more easily searchable.

Myk Willis also outlined how there is increasingly more metadata attached to multimedia files that allows them to be searched.

He continued by stressing that "the most exciting work with multimedia search has to do with extracting higher-level information from content files and using that to associate content".

With the growth of social networking sites, there is now more scope for driving searchable multimedia content as more media is made available in order to attract users.

TechNewsWorld recently called for the application of search engine optimisation principles to alternative text for graphics, in order to provide more favourable placing in organic search listings.

Category: Natural search