Multimedia Search Tools
Audio
- FindSounds
Free site where you can search the Web for sound effects (animals, birds, office sounds, etc.) and musical instrument samples. - Freesound Project
Search for sounds uploaded by users under the Creative Commons license. Registered users can download files in mp3, aiff, or wav formats. - MySpace Music
Formerly imeem Free, on-demand music and video streaming with the costs supported by advertising. - Odeo
Browse or search for podcasts (radio programs in MP3 format.) - Podscope
Uses speech recognition technology to make every word searchable within a podcast, thus enabling the audio indexing of podcast content. Powered by TVEyes. - Public Radio Podcast Directory
Directory of more than 800 podcasts. You can sort the list by category, by name, or by source. - Yahoo Music
Internet radio, music videos, artists, music news, interviews and performances.
Images
- Ask.com Image Search
Results page lets you limit by size, color, and file type (BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG). Also provides suggestions to narrow or broaden your search. - Bing Images
Microsoft Interesting feature: use Show Similar Images to find pictures resembling the one you’ve chosen. Also features Visual Search, which lets you start with a genre (dog breeds, film legends, U.S. politicians, etc.) and then limit your results. - Creative Commons Search Engine
Find photos, music, text, books, educational material, and more marked as free to use with only “some rights reserved” or “no rights reserved.” If you respect the rights the authors have reserved, you can use the works without having to contact them and ask permission. - Cydral
French image search engine with an index (as of 8/23/2005) of more than 157 million images. To retrieve other images that are visually similar to an image you’re viewing, click on the “Similar Images” link. - Desktop Publishing Clip Art
About.com Find free clip art images, especially those suitable for print. Organized by subject. Available in TIFF, PCX, GIF and other graphics formats. About.com also has a page devoted to free Web clip art. - Exalead Image Search
Index of 1 billion images. Results page limits include: size (small, medium, large), wallpaper sizes (800×600, etc.), layout orientation (landscape or portrait), color, and file types (GIF, JPG, PNG). You can also include/exclude images that contain human faces. - Facesaerch
“Cover-flow” front-end to Google image search, limited to facial shots. - Flickr: Creative Commons
Yahoo Search more than 20 million photographs available under 4 types of Creative Commons licenses which can be combined: Attribution (credit given), Noncommercial, No Derivative Works (only verbatim copies can be used), and Share Alike (derivative works can be distributed only under a license identical to the original work.) - Fotosearch
Search more than 700,000 images from over 50 stock photography, illustration, and video footage publishers. - Google Image Search
Search Google’s index of more than 2 billion images. You can limit to face shots by appending &imgtype=face to the URL of the results page (example). - New York Public Library Digital Gallery
Provides access to over 360,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities in the collections of the NYPL, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints and photographs, illustrated books, printed ephemera and more. Search or browse. - New York Times Photo Archives
Search or browse images in 12 categories. - PhillyHistory.org
City of Philadelphia, Department of Records Contains more than 2 million photo records dating from the late nineteenth century. Searchable by keyword, address/location, and date. - Picsearch
Search-only interface. Claims to provide family-safe image searching because “all offensive material is filtered out by our advanced filtering systems.” - Symbols.com
Collection of 2,500 symbols. Browse by subject index or search by 4 graphics characteristics. - Yahoo Image Search
Search Yahoo’s index of more than 1.6 billion images, plus images from its Flickr photo sharing site.
Video
- AOL Video
Lets you search the Web for free videos, upload your own content, or purchase shows from any one of 45 video-on-demand channels. Incorporates Singingfish and Truveo search engines (both owned by AOL). AOL also has an archive of free television shows called In2TV. - Blinkx Video Search
Uses speech recognition technology to create a searchable transcript of audio and video content. Search and play more than 1 million hours of video from ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, ESPN, Fox News, ITN, NBC, Reuters, and more. As of 6/29/2005, Blinkx is also indexingpodcasts. - British Pathe Film Archive
Searchable database of the 3,500 hour British Pathe Film Archive which covers news, sports, social history and entertainment from 1896 to 1970. - Exalead Video Search
Searches content from Dailymotion, IFILM, kewego.fr, Metacafe, and YouTube. - Google Video Search
Search and watch videos clips that Google has indexed, including content from YouTube, which is owned by Google. You can download much of this content and view it using the downloadable Google video player. There is also an Official Google Video Blog. - Hulu
View thousands of videos, from full episodes of new and classic TV shows to full-length movies, web originals and clips from more than 130 content providers, including FOX, NBC Universal, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros. and more. - Revver
Video-sharing platform that pairs uploaded videos with targeted advertisements. Ad revenue is shared with the video owner. - Search People in Video
Reuters Uses facial recognition-based video indexing and search technology that lets you search for people appearing in video clips. - Searchforvideo
Search by keyword or browse by 10 categories: News, Sports, Entertainment, TV, Music, Movies, Celebrities, Business, Health, and Viral (extreme). - Truveo
AOL Aggregates more than 100 million videos (as of 1/4/2008) from numerous sites including Google Video, MSN Video, MySpace, YouTube, and others. - TVEyes
Uses speech-recognition technology to make TV video clips from the BBC, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and Reuters searchable by keyword. - Video Surf
Uses visual identification technology, rather than metadata, in its search engine. - Yahoo Video Search
Features user-generated videos, direct feeds from Yahoo partner sites, and content discovered by crawling the Web. - YouTube
Browse, search, and view millions of videos uploaded by users around the world. Site was founded in early 2005 and acquired by Google in October 2006. There is also an officialYouTube blog.
