Although a bit speculative, John Rhodes puts together an argument for why Google will dominate the music search space. John starts by providing a brief overview of the enabling technologies / barriers to entry (my words) that he believe will be critical to the success of music search online. Among the technologies he lists are BitTorrent, RSS, Audio Blogs (as demonstrated on NPR), Podcasting and Speech-to-Text conversion.
Assuming the technology described above works, and it does, then Google is in a position to control audio search on the internet. To succeed, they only need to get between the files and the people who want the files. Once they index audio files and once they parse audio files, the game is over. No other search engine will be able to compete with them. They have the money, technology, and (unbelievable) brainpower to stay ahead for a long time.
While I agree that it's likely that Google will make a play here, I think that there are still some sensitive areas to be worked out with regard to DRM and other such hairy issues. Clearly there is a large opportunity here, but the barriers to entry are rather large. However, if anyone can move mountains, it's liklely to be Google…or Microsoft???? ;)
1. I can only hope it's Google versus Microsoft on an audio search engine.
Surely there is some way to kick start the testing process by having people be invited to participate (like Gmail) to submit and search audio feeds after they have agreed to whatever legal terms and conditions are needed. This Podocasting (or audio Tivo trend) is already catching on faster then expected and people are popping up all over the net with their own audio broadcasts. This should be a large enough test bed of publically broadcasted audio to test sooner then later.
And let's not underestimate the power of the Open Software Foundation and the global army of programmers developing amazing code too. If Google doesn't, what would keep 'all the other amazing intelligent people' around the world from coming up with code that index's audio feeds.
Tom
http://4webresults.com
Posted at 4:38AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Tom Parish