Singingfish

» see singingfish.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

I never typed singingfish.com into a browser. I almost certainly used it anyway, and so did most people who opened a media player in the early 2000s and searched for something inside it.

The company started in Seattle in mid 1999 and had seventeen people by January 2000. Its public alpha went out at Streaming Media East in New York in June 2000. The premise was that ordinary crawlers were built for words on pages and were close to useless at finding a sound file or a video clip, which by then were multiplying faster than anyone could catalog by hand.

It solved that in the least glamorous way available. A dedicated crawler went looking for media links specifically, and the index it built covered MP3, QuickTime, Windows Media and RealMedia. At its working peak in 2003 and 2004 it was turning up around fifty thousand new pieces of audio and video every day. Content deals with MTV and the BBC put professional material next to whatever the crawler had scraped off the open web.

Then it did the thing that makes a company profitable and invisible at the same time. Instead of selling a destination, it sold the search: Windows Media Player, RealOne, AOL Search, Dogpile and Metacrawler all had their media results coming from Singingfish. If you clicked search inside your player, this was the company answering.

On a 33.6k line in Turkey none of that was very useful to me at home, because streaming in 1999 was a rumor and a buffering bar. The internet cafe years from 2002 were different. Those machines had RealPlayer and Windows Media Player sitting on the desktop like everything else, and the search boxes in them worked.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what asterias was for ~

The crawler had its own name, Asterias, which is the genus of the common starfish. It was written to ferret out audio and video links rather than to index prose, and that distinction was the whole company. A text crawler reads a page and stores the words. A media crawler has to notice that a page is a doorway to a file it cannot read at all, then decide what that file probably is from its name and the text sitting around the link.

This is why the index was worth buying twice. Nobody in 2000 had a good way to search a file whose contents were opaque. Singingfish had the least bad way, and it had been running it long enough to have real coverage.

~ the thomson years ~

Thomson multimedia bought the company in November 2000 for an undisclosed price, which is a strange sentence when you remember what Thomson was. This was the consumer electronics group that owned RCA, a hardware company buying a search index. The logic was that Thomson was moving into digital media and wanted the part that found things.

Three years later AOL bought it from Thomson, again for a price nobody published. AOL at that point was assembling a search story out of parts, and a working video index was one of the parts it did not have. For about two years the arrangement held, with Singingfish running as its own site and simultaneously powering the results AOL showed elsewhere.

~ the 301 to aol video ~

In June 2005 AOL relaunched its video search with Singingfish results inside it, which was the announcement of the end without anybody calling it that. If the results are the same, keeping two brands alive costs money for nothing. The last staff were laid off in December 2006.

On 7 February 2007 singingfish.com became a permanent redirect to video.aol.com. There was no farewell page and no explanation, which is fair enough for a product whose users mostly did not know they were using it. The technology stayed inside AOL and the name stopped existing. Video search got harder for everyone after that, in the sense that YouTube arrived and the question changed from where is this clip on the web to what is it called on the one site that has it.

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