AltaVista Co. Monday enhanced its flagship
search engine by adding audio, video and image-specific searches.
While AltaVista, a CMGI Inc. (CMGI) property, had previously offered
multimedia search results, Monday’s enhancement separates the multimedia
content for simplified searching. The new searches feature an index of more
than 30 million documents, the company said.
The company also teamed up multimedia content providers ABCNEWS.com, EMusic.com and Merrill Lynch to offer comprehensive results.
No financial terms of the alliances were disclosed.
The updated search engine includes a targeted MP3/audio search, video search
and image search. They are designed to provide users with a customized
searching environment with a simple user interfaces, as well as tutorial
guides to provide instructions and “how to” examples, such as how to
download videos or how to load and listen to MP3 music.
Monday’s move was made to answer the growing demand for multimedia
information, said Greg Memo, vice president and general manager of AltaVista
Search.
“There’s been explosive growth in the demand for multimedia content over the
past year,” he said. “AltaVista handles more than three million multimedia
search queries each
day, which is more than 10 times the number we were receiving a year ago.”
“Our new features and premier multimedia content partners demonstrate our
unyielding
commitment to provide users with the largest, most relevant and up-to-date
library of multimedia
content.”
