GoFish, started by the founder of the now-defunct Musiclocker service, announced on November 29 the launch of its new search engine www.gofish.com aimed at helping music lovers find tunes across a growing number of online music stores. GoFish allows people to simultaneously search for songs from Napster, Buy.com, iTunes and a host of other online music merchants. The site also looks for audiobooks, video, ring tones and games. GoFish founder Michael Downing said that it's a way to create the logical link between search and the fast-growing world of legally downloadable digital media.
The GoFish Web site www.gofish.com may not exist for long, however. Downing's goal is to license the technology to other search engines. Downing said he already has talked with most search engines about partnerships and hopes to announce a deal before the end of the year. He said the prospective partnership is with a second-tier search engine rather than a top site like Google or Yahoo. Promoting GoFish as a stand-alone Web site would be too costly, he said, and not necessary once a major search engine is using the technology.
General search engines are not well-suited to finding downloadable music, however. Searching for an artist's name usually turns up official Web sites or fan pages among the top results. Aggregating data GoFish works differently. It functions in much the same way as comparison shopping sites, which aggregate feeds of product information from online retailers. GoFish pulls in catalog feeds from music sellers, grouping them into a searchable index. GoFish also directs users to their merchant of choice to complete a given sale.
