Top 10 Music Search Engines

August 13th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Verticals | 40 Comments »

Over at Read/WriteWeb, they’re featuring on-line music this week, so we thought we’d help out over here at AltSearchEngines with the Top 10 Alternative Music Search Engines. In addition to listing them for you, I also asked each one to find my #1 song, Rihanna’s Umbrella. After all, if you can’t find that song, “laundry may not be your biggest problem” as Jerry Seinfeld would say! I hope to be able to show you that you will get slightly different results depending on which one of these – all excellent – search engines you select. One note: in order to see the necessary details, there are some larger than usual graphics coming. Please be patient; it’s worth it.

#1) blinkx. Truly one of the larger alts, with a new partnership almost every week it seems. It’s a video search engine, not strictly music, but luckily it’s a music video that I’m looking for. What I like about blinkx is this “wall” feature. It’s pretty self-explanatory. Instead of a list of text results, you get this huge wall of videos! Of course, I could now add all of our video search engines, but that will have to wait.

#2) SkreemR is an Audio Search Engine, and it had no trouble finding the song for me.

#3 podnova lists subscription sites. It found several choices, and many of them went to iTunes where you could subscribe and download them.

#4 MP3Realm searches for mp3 files, of course, and it found this one for Rihanna.

#5 FindSounds is a little different. When it says it finds “sounds,” it means it quite literally. So while it did not find the song, “Umbrella,” it did find the sound of an umbrella opening! It’s not as silly as it might seem. FindSounds can be used to find sound effects for a video you’re working on, for example.

#6 Audiobaba’s server is down. Bad luck.

#7 seeqpod found several renditions of Umbrella, and then with a “click, click” here it opens into a video player. It also has several other nice built-in features such as Tour Dates, Ringtones, News, and more; take a look around, there’s plenty to see in seeqpod.

#8 everyzing (the search engine formerly known as PodZinger) is the only one of the bunch that took me to Alvin and the Chipmunk’s version of “Umbrella,” and, just for that, we have dropped them from the Top 100 list! (Just kidding; here’s the real video they also provided.)

#9 is an old classic; Music-Map. An early music recommendation engine, you can see that when I searched for Rihanna, it formed a kind of tag cloud around her name. The closer the other name(s) the more they should sound like her, hopefully leading you to discover a new artist.

#10 LivePlasma does essentially the same thing, but with brightly colored balloons! Here, the size of the balloon communicates popularity. Unfortunately, LivePlasma was the only one of the 10 that did not even know who Rihanna was. The name in the middle is “Roland Hanna.” They need to do some serious catching up!

If you’re into music, I would encourage you to try all of these out just as I did. Pick your favorite artist, or song, and see which music search engine you like the best. But please come back and leave a quick comment telling us which one you liked the most and why.

AltSearchEngines Essay Competion Winners!

August 13th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in News | 4 Comments »

The First Place (”Win”) winner in our Essay Competition is Michael Hussey, CEO of Search Engine PeekYou.

Google and Yahoo currently have a stranglehold (75%) on the search market for one simple reason – for the past six or seven years they have offered users the most relevant search results. Through long-term success these two have achieved mindshare, thus significant path dependencies exist within their core user base. MSN, AOL, and Ask, own the next 20% of market share. This means that 95 out of every 100 Internet searches are owned by five companies (actually four companies, if you consider that AOL now displays Google results). This exercise asks us to consider the remaining 5% of alternative search engines as being one general entity and we are tasked with increasing the Alt’s market share to 7% or beyond.

Nearly every alt engine has its own unique quirks, positive or negative, and a considerable number of these engines do indeed offer quality of output that rivals most any search result from the major 95% market share holders. Yet most Internet users have never heard of nearly any of them. Before making direct suggestions on how to compete by creating a better search experience, it is more important to consider the products that already exist in the alt search market, and understand what drives the 95% of search users to the big five engines.

Consider the three second-tier search engines, MSN, AOL, and Ask.com. MSN has the benefit of being Internet Explorer’s default homepage (used by more than 70% of Internet users), and they’ve spent many millions working on their search technology to catch up to Google, but it clearly isn’t there yet in terms of quality. AOL has the benefit being the country’s largest ISP, therefore able to place its homepage in front of millions of people every day – but they do not offer links to Google’s advanced tools (which require a Google login). Ask.com is a well-funded company with a simple domain name that continues to spend millions of dollars driving traffic, and though their search results have improved over the years, the results are still not yet generally considered superior to Google or Yahoo. The obvious question is why would 20% of the market utilize inferior search services? The answer is likely that less sophisticated users make up a greater percentage of this 20% than Google’s and Yahoo’s user base.

For more evidence of this, cross-reference Quantcast.com’s demographic information. It indicates that Google and Yahoo attract a larger percentage of users in the 18-34 age group (the most Internet-savvy age group), generally coming from higher income households.

http://www.quantcast.com/google.com
http://www.quantcast.com/yahoo.com
http://www.quantcast.com/aol.com
http://www.quantcast.com/msn.com
http://www.quantcast.com/ask.com

There are two reasons why the quickest path to increasing market share is to focus marketing and education efforts on the demographics which make up 20% owned by the second-tier search engines. First, these users are likely newer to the Internet, and more open to trying new ways of surfing. Second, it is easier to demonstrate higher quality search results from an alt-engine over the second-tier engines, rather than Google and Yahoo, whose users are affected by stronger path-dependencies.

To attract this new audience, marketing materials must focus on how your alt-engine makes life easier and improves the online search experience; how it provides quicker and more accurate information, thus creating a more comfortable online experience.

Much can be learned from Ask.com’s growth over the page five years. Previous to their disastrous 2007 marketing campaign (“The Algorithm Killed Jeeves”), emphasizing simplicity and user-friendliness was precisely their approach. Ask created effective television commercials that in effect spoke the following message: “Go to Ask.com – type in any question in the world – and we’ll give you the answer.”

Remember, before your alt-engine acquires a Yahoo-sized market share, it has to first get an Ask.com and MSN sized percentage. Grab the users at the margin first – and then go for the big time.

-Michael Hussey CEO, PeekYou.com
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