Eight years ago Nick Whyte and our team at AltaVista invented multi-media search. We were the first with Image (picture) Search, Video Search, and Music Search. Seven years ago I joined the team at Napster where we invented P2P music search and file sharing. Pioneers sometimes win fame, but rarely earn fortunes. In this case, the not so fast "fast follower" Google will probably make the fortune.
C/Net broke the story Google whistles a new tune. Funny, I went to Google this morning and couldn't find it. It only shows up as a secondary option after returning results of a search. For example, if you enter "Vanessa Williams" in the regular search box Google will return a results page as usual. One of the first results will have a link that says "More music results for Vanessa Williams". This link spawns a new page with music related results and a new "Search Music" button.
All that multi-media search technology we developed at AltaVista is now the property of Yahoo. Yahoo acquired AltaVista several years ago and many of the brilliant AV engineers are still there. In fact, the Image, Video, and Music search technology is still working on the Yahoo site today.
Incidentally, Nick Whyte now works with the MSN Search group at Microsoft. MSN Search already has Image Search and could add Music Search at anytime. Gee, could Video Search be next?
Both AltaVista and Napster were ahead of their time. The technology was great but the business model hadn't developed and the market wasn't quite ready. In both cases there were several strategic decision blunders as well. I wrote blog articles on my time at AltaVista and Napster that detail the story and lessons learned.
Maybe Google isn't 8 years late...maybe AltaVista was 8 years early. We had the technology at AltaVista and we tried to make ecommerce deals with Amazon and CDNow for music, and Corbis and Getty Images for Images, but we were just too early for the market. Eight years later, maybe the time is right.
Recent Comments