AOL revamps multimedia search engine

America Online on Wednesday unveiled a new version of Singingfish, a search engine for finding video and audio clips on the Web. The online arm of Time Warner, which bought Singingfish last year, has made a bigger investment in multimedia search at a time when more consumers, armed with high-speed Internet access, begin to seek out audio and video online, and as search-related advertising soars. AOL also is facing coming competition from all the major Internet portals including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

With its update of Singingfish.com, AOL plans to market the site more aggressively to consumers, as opposed to only the unit's licensing partners, which include RealNetworks. Changes to Singingfish include search by file type--MP3, Windows Media, and so on--personalization features for saving searches, and filters for blocking adult content. The index includes roughly 14 million audio and video streams and is updated with thousands more daily, according to the company.