Munax AB’s second version of the new multimedia search engine, www.PlayAudioVideo.com, will be released the last week of May 2008, offering a multimedia index from more than 3 billion pages.

Jan-Olof Granlund, Munax AB’s CEO, says: “You don’t have to jump around to different sites to find what you’re looking for. PlayAudioVideo provides a composite search function that shows video, audio/music and image results on one page.

“You can pre-listen to music files or pre-view a video before connecting to the site where it’s stored on the web.”

The beta version of PlayAudioVideo was released in February 2008 and received positive reviews from users, he says. The second version will offer more indexed pages and an improved user interface.

PlayAudioVideo also offers a “transcode” function that enables users to convert and download files through the browser with the click of a mouse. “You can then store and play the file on your own device, laptop or mobile phone. This is very popular with young people.”

As for content copyright issues, Granlund points out that PlayAudioVideo does not store any files, and its transcode page informs users that they are responsible for checking with the site owner to see if material is free for download. Pre-view and pre-listen functions are limited to 3 and 16 seconds, respectively, which Granlund says are the industry-agreed time limits.

“PlayAudioVideo doesn’t store anything. Like any other search engine, it just points you to where you can find it on the web,” he says.

PlayAudioVideo shows video results at the top of the page, with the audio results underneath and image results in the right margin. Users can select whether to search within web pages, BitTorrent files or both.

Users can also use a filter to screen what they consider offensive content, he says.

PlayAudioVideo, Granlund says, is based on the Munax search technology, which is a high-performance system for efficient distribution of processing power and data. Munax has no core, rather it uses the processing power of multiple servers, he says. The first version, Munax P1, was sold to Iceland’s search portal www.leit.is in 2005.

Munax also is packaged for corporate customers and it can be installed on any computer operating system for searching all documents, including images, video files, zipped files, software and e-mail addresses.

Granlund says Munax's future plans include launching the “world’s first all-content search engine,” which will use composite search to index not only multimedia but html pages, compressed files, e-mail addresses and a wide range of document types.

“This will eliminate the need for a user to change search engines if they want to search for something else,” he says.



David Callahan