Tuesday nights on AltSearchEngines we host debates between Alternative Search Engines around a common topic. Tonight we are fortunate to have two great MP3 search engines: MP3Realm (Josh) and SkreemR (James). Feel free to ask questions or leave comments after the debate!

Q. What are the advantages of an MP3 search niche?

MP3Realm: There are many advantages of this to the public. There aren’t enough quality websites that will allow the entire world to listen to tracks in the entirety. While the music industry considers this “stealing” it actually benefits them sales-wise. A music search engine that doesn’t exclude any band is also very important for those underground / garage bands that are just starting up. Purevolume has done an excellent job of getting them heard. The more they get heard the more songs will become available in our index.

SkreemR: A great advantage of the MP3 search niche is that our site can be
customized for people interested in audio content. In traditional search engines where you are just finding and giving the user a link to a web page, there’s only so much you can do. Because we’re looking for specific types of content, we can do some cool things with the results we return. So we can have a great search engine that takes people right to the audio files they’re seeking, and then surround them with the best tools, links and services specific to our content type.

So once you find that awesome song you’ve been searching for, you can also read the lyrics, add the song to facebook, read the Wikipedia entry for the band or artist, buy concert tickets or get the album from Amazon to name a few.

Q. What are challenges of an MP3 search niche?

MP3Realm: The biggest challenge is getting content. Without having the needed bandwidth or amount of servers we simply cannot crawl the entire web for music, so we rely on meta search engines and user submitted websites. The next biggest thing is monetizing a music / mp3 based website. Their just isn’t any money in it, therefore the cost of running such a project gets into the way. Especially when the site is growing. Oh, and legality (fear of being sued), how did I leave that out?

SkreemR: A big challenge is the frequency that audio files are posted and removed from the Internet. We re-check our files on a regular basis to make sure that the links are in good working order, which takes a fair amount of time and resources. Another challenge is extracting the right metadata from files and web pages. People frequently mis-label files and have incomplete or erroneous data in ID3 tags. Indexing all the content we find with meaningful meta-data is one of our strengths.

Q. How much interest is there?

MP3Realm: Actually a lot of interest; the majority of users who don’t understand how search engines work actually email the help support for mp3 requests :o. But unfortunately, not a lot to web advertising companies so bad for monetizing for expansion. With the unfortunate and unexplained death of SingingFish.com and WebJay.com , traffic arriving at Mp3Realm has increased rapidly. Also. the three major search engines simply omit mp3 search. Google doesn’t have one, Yahoo! did, in my honest opinion, a horrible job at implementing an mp3 search. I’m surprised if even a slice of people can understand how to navigate it. And MSN, due to what major company owns it , you will not see an mp3 search from Microsoft the makers of DRM.

SkreemR: There appears to be a huge interest in Mp3 search. We’ve seen a lot of
traffic since we went live with SkreemR - it’s been a nice surprise. So obviously there is a good demand for our service. There are a number of similar search engines out there, but I think people can tell that SkreemR was created by a team with a similar love for music as our users have. We built SkreemR from the standpoint of someone who loves music, and I believe this has greatly added to the interest we have sparked.

Q.What’s next for your MP3 search engine?

MP3Realm: I would have to say a major overhaul. We most likely will be switching to a more friendly web design featuring more Web 2.0 ideas using AJAX. We are trying to make the website more friendly for users who wish to add playlists of songs onto social networking sites like Myspace, Bebo, Facebook etc.. Maybe even a web forum and a commenting system for playlist sharing. We will also be hiring more translators to add more languages to the website for foreign users.

SkeemR: We have some neat features in the works, things we think people will have some fun with. We just rolled out a Facebook application, and plan to do a mobile version of SkreemR next. But the core vision will always focus on search. There will always be ways to improve how we help people to find what they are looking for. So constantly refining our search algorithms is number one. As well, we are continually crawling more and more content and we plan on vastly increasing our index of audio material in the months ahead.

Q. Do you see any potential for partnerships with other alternatives search engines, or do you plan to go it alone? Or perhaps partner with the major search engines or non-search engine entities?

MP3Realm: Do I see it? No. Would I like to? Yeah. I’m personally not one for big corporations or giant search engines to be #1 at everything. I would love to partner with some of the more major independent mp3 search engines and maybe even meta-search engines. It would be beneficial to have a centralized database of crawled links between partners, but still have everything else separate. Therefore each of our own ID3 tag reading software can still be used and stored in our own database format.

SkreemR: Partnerships with other entities are definitely part of our business model. We think there are many opportunities where SkreemR search could be integrated into existing sites and applications. We intend to be the leader in audio search technology and we hope to see many sites “Powered by SkreemR” in the future!

Many thanks to MP3Realm and SkreemR for taking the time to share their thoughts.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Debates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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