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Media Wombat Flash Search Engine

Overview

http://mediawombat.com is a search engine designed to find and display content embedded inside of Adobe flash (.swf) files.

We crawl the internet looking for SWF files, then grab them, rip them apart, index them and then allow for the contents of them to be searched.

Why?

Google and other search engines don't index the insides of any files mainly because they have to spend resources (CPU/Disk) pulling the SWF file apart and actually host the contents of those files after unpacking the content. Google indexes the text of a web page and points back to the original URL (quick-n-dirty), but if google finds a ZIP file, they won't index the files inside of that zip file for the same reasons.

Flash content is everywhere on the internet nowadays, from youtube.com to nbcnews.com to disney.com. It allows for webpages to engage the user with a much more dynamic experience, but the problem is that to a crawler (aka, Google, Yahoo, Ask, ...) it's just another file that they throw away. Our technology actually takes as many parts of the Flash contents as posible and indexes those parts.

Ads

"Adsense" doesn't work with Flash because Google doesn't see inside of the flash files, so it doesn't have anything relevant to use for the context-senstive part of AdSense. Were working on an "Adsense/Adwords" ad distribution system that does know about the inside of flash content to bring context-sensitive ads to flash-heavy websites.

Our audience

We believe that they are several types of users who would be interested in searching for Flash content.

  • Flash Developers – "I need a button image or a beep sound to use in my own flash animation."
  • Online Video Game Players – There are numerous Flash games online that can be found via our search.
  • People in advertising/marketing industry could use the site to view/find Flash based ads.
  • General Users - We could promote the idea that there is “hidden and exciting” content on the web that the other search engines don’t know about.
    • Image Search
    • MP3 (sound) search
    • FLV (video) search

Current Status

Our search results are not very good right now. We are in the very early startup phase of our website. The crawler has only been crawling for a while, we only have crawled a handfull of websites, and our search query technology is only in the keyword phase. All of these things require time and money to implement. As things progress we'll improve our infrastructure and ramp-up as quickly as we can.

We're working on a professional logo now, and we're always making small changes to the site or the back-end technology.

It's a simple concept and we believe it has great potential.

What's with the Name?

Domain names aren't as easy to come by as you'd think nowadays. You'd be suprised at the number of domains that we came up with like flash____.com and media_____.com that were already taken. We found that Media<animal>.com was pretty good, and we just kind of liked the sound of Wombat. We're not in love with the name or the logo, so if anyone has any better ideas, please let us know.  :)

Links

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