Thomas did not divulge specific traffic figures, but she said that since stories started showing up in results churned out by major search engines, the NPR site has seen record spikes in visitors for high-interest news stories, such as the murder of American hostage Nick Berg in Iraq.
Sound and fury signifying as nothing
NPR's move points to the limitations of Google and Yahoo at a time when broadband Internet connections are becoming more popular among consumers, fostering new demand for multimedia content. Publishers are increasingly adding exclusive audio and video content for online access; educators are streaming courses online; broadcasters are bringing vast archives online in digital form; and small-time publishers are finding it cheaper and cheaper to create, produce and host multimedia on the Web. Yet you wouldn't find any of it on the primary search engines.
That's created an opportunity for specialty search engines focused on filling the gap. Already, technology companies including Singingfish, StreamSage, Hewlett-Packard, Virage, Nexidia and others have emerged to address some of the challenges. Yahoo and AOL are players, too. Yahoo owns AltaVista, which has one of the Web's oldest audio and video search engines, but so far, Yahoo has not sought to feature the technology. America Online, another dark horse in the search race, bought Singingfish earlier this year.
"There's a tremendous upsurge in the amount of streams available on the Internet," Singingfish general manager Karen Howe said. "Because of broadband adoption, which is so strong in the enterprise and in the home, accessing high-quality content now is not such a pain for the user." Singingfish fields about 6 million searches a day, up from 3 million in January, and records about 80,000 new streams a day.
Yahoo's and Google's drawbacks could underscore the need for even more specialty search engines or prompt advancements from the status quo. Unleashing new features almost daily, the major search engines are in a race to win the hearts and clicks of Web surfers with their search tools, largely because it means more advertising revenue in their pockets. And with Google's upcoming $2.7bn (£1.5bn) IPO, the competition could get even more heated, launching the two companies into new realms of rivalry.
The technologies that Yahoo and Google rely on today are focused on mining text on the Internet for content relative to keywords. Among other techniques, they analyse the interconnectedness between Web pages and examine the headers and anchor text on a page so that they can return appropriate Web sites for any keyword, or set of keywords a surfer does a search on. Even images -- an increasingly popular source for Web searches on Google and Yahoo -- are tied to text that defines the pictures.
