That was the question facing National Public Radio's online director Maria Thomas earlier this year. The answer would seem obvious for anyone doing business on the Web, where being included in search results can mean the difference between success and oblivion.
But in Thomas' case it wasn't that simple: most "spiders" that crawl and index the Web are effectively blind to audio and video content, making NPR's highly regarded radio programming all but invisible to mainstream search engines.
Indexing files by looking at their audio features is still a work in progress for big search engines, including Google. So NPR eventually hit on a plan to instantly turn audio broadcasts into text files that can be recognised and picked up by search engine spiders.
"Our site is primarily full of rich audio, and we want people to find it when it's relevant," Thomas said. "The big search engines' technologies don't have the ability to get inside the audio or video. With the little bit of text we have on NPR, it's not always good enough to find our content, and reference the page."
Consumers armed with broadband connections at home are driving new demand for multimedia content and setting off a new wave of technology development among search engine companies eager to extend their empires from the static world of text to the dynamic realm of video and audio.
The stakes are enormous, not just for the search engines, but for content owners hoping to harness the Internet, stand out in the online information glut and attract new audiences. The winning search companies could become the gatekeepers in a new era of media increasingly defined by consumers' ability to seek out programming on their own terms and consume when and how they want.
NPR is not the first company to bend over backward for recognition on the search engines, which drive the bulk of traffic to hundreds of thousands of Web sites. But it may be the first broadcaster to adopt a guerrillalike strategy for insinuating its audio in the search indices. And the company's strategy is working so far: in recent weeks, NPR audio has begun regularly appearing on the index pages of Google News and Yahoo News, and clips also crop up when people search for news-related keywords, such as "Abu Ghraib," the name of the notorious prison in Iraq.
