New Search Engine Scours Web for Multimedia Sites
Finding a specific piece of information on the vast World Wide Web can be a true art. But a group of UCLA students is trying to make a science out of finding art--and other pictures, video and sound--on the Internet with a new search engine specifically designed to locate multimedia files.
Instead of trying to sift through all 320 million pages of the Web, Scour.net zeros in on a much more manageable subset of sites that contain multimedia files. That should make Web surfing more efficient for people who are looking for the flashiest stuff on the global computer network, said Dan Rodrigues, president of Scour, the Los Angeles start-up he founded with four fellow computer science undergraduates.
Scour officially unveiled Scour.net this month, and is already logging 160,000 distinct visitors a month, Rodrigues said.
“It’s really great,” said Dick Muntz, chairman of the UCLA computer science department, who has been studying multimedia indexing for about five years and has worked with members of the Scour team. “It does a really good job of locating information, indexing it and providing convenient ways for searching multimedia.”
Tightly focused search engines are catching on. Orchid enthusiasts, for example, can use Pollinia (https://www.pollinia.com) to find Web sites devoted to their favorite flowers.
But a search engine devoted to multimedia could not only prove useful, it could also sustain a profitable business, said Paul Hagen, a Forrester Research analyst who studies Web searching.
“It’s a niche thing, but if you can provide a service that captures 10% of the population of the Internet, then you’re viable,” said Hagen, who is based in Cambridge, Mass.
Scour.net grew out of several student research projects that involved indexing multimedia computer files. In December, five students decided to pool their research and use it to build a new kind of search engine.
Instead of looking at the text on a Web page like traditional search engines, such as Excite (https://www.excite.com) and AltaVista (https://altavista.digital.com), Scour.net examines the links to audio, video and picture files created in all major multimedia formats, including RealAudio, RealVideo, QuickTime and Shockwave. Then it opens up those files to download key information that is used to create a multimedia index, which is updated every night, Rodrigues said.
Visitors to the Scour.net site (https://www.scour.net) can use keywords to search for things in the multimedia index, or they can click their way through eight Yahoo-style categories such as music, news and sports to find what they’re looking for.
Rodrigues, Vince Busam, Jason Droege, Kevin Smilak and Michael Todd put Scour.net on the Web at the beginning of the year. At first, it was just a hobby.
“We just set it up there and didn’t promote it much,” Rodrigues said. “Suddenly we were getting 70,000 page views per day. So we decided to regroup and form this company.”
They spent the spring perfecting Scour.net and raising seed money from investors. In April, they demonstrated their technology to representatives from 50 companies who had gathered at UCLA.
Scour has raised $150,000 so far, with about one-third of the total coming from Smilak’s stepfather. An additional $30,000 came from members of the Placentia Pathology Medical Group, where Rodrigues helped his father upgrade a computer network a few years ago.
“They’ve got a really good business plan,” said Douglas Andorka, a pathologist and president of the medical practice. Andorka said he decided to invest after his nephew, an engineering student in Silicon Valley, told him lots of students he knew were using Scour.net.
Scour has also been earning advertising revenue since February through a partnership with 24/7 Media, a New York-based Internet advertising agency, Rodrigues said. Although he can’t say how much revenue the ads have brought in, the amount has more than reimbursed him and Smilak--who serves as Scour’s vice president of software development--for their initial $10,000 investment. Ad revenue continues to grow, he said.
Hagen said Scour could become more successful in a few years, when more people have the kinds of high-bandwidth Internet connections that make it easy to download data-heavy multimedia files in minutes--or even seconds.
The five founders have drafted four additional students for their project. The nine Scour students may be young--they are all in their early 20s--but they already have a combined resume that includes stints at several leading Internet companies.
Rodrigues, who graduated from UCLA in June, said he has deferred a job offer from Andersen Consulting that would have paid him a base salary of more than $50,000 a year to work as a technology analyst in Palo Alto. Two other Scour team members who have graduated--Smilak and Ryan King--have been admitted to graduate school at Stanford University but will continue to work with the company and may not enroll right away, they said.
“It’s difficult to pass up the opportunity to work for an Internet start-up with some of my close friends,” King said.
“That’s something that many computer science graduates like to dream about. I know that in the short term, I can learn a great deal more from my experiences at Scour than I could hope to learn in any classroom.”
