From Wendy Boswell,
Your Guide to Web Search.
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NOTE: SingingFish is alas, no more. It has been acquired by AOL. If you're looking for great video and multimedia search engines, here's a few ideas:

• Free Movie Downloads: Free movie downloads are more common than you think on the Web. You won't find the most recent blockbuster here, but you will find a huge amount of classics, trailers, independent films, documentaries, and more.
• Top Ten Most Popular Video Sites: Here are the top ten most popular video sites on the web - you'll be able to use these sites to find all sorts of free videos, movies, and documentaries, as well as short films, viral videos, and much more.

What is SingingFish?

SingingFish is a fun audio and video search engine that you can use to find all kinds of differently formatted audio and video files. SingingFish is not a general search engine; you can only use it to search for multimedia files, which would include Windows Media files, Real Player files, QuickTime files, mp3 files, and more. It's a great way to find multimedia, because SingingFish targets nothing but multimedia.

SingingFish Home Page

The SingingFish home page might seem a bit busy when you first look at it, but give yourself some time to get acclimated and you'll start seeing how much there is to do and find here.

The search bar is very prominently placed near the top of the page, and invites you to start searching right away.

You can start narrowing down your results immediately with the column to the left labeled "Settings" - check the family filter if you would like your results to not include material that is considered non-family friendly; however, since SingingFish crawls the Web with automated spiders, there's no guarantee that even with the family filter your results will come back squeaky clean. They do their best to filter it, but I would use parental caution and safety common sense when allowing the youngsters on SingingFish, just in case.

SingingFish Search

You can select options from the left hand side drop-down menu to limit your search parameters to audio and video, audio only, or video only; limit what formats you'd like to search for (mp3, Real, Windows, or QuickTime), narrow categories (all categories are checked off by default), limit how many results you'd like per page, and you also have the option of allowing SingingFish to remember your settings, or restore what they were in the first place.

I would only fool around with the settings if you're really, really sure of what you're searching for; it's fun to see what different options come back if you make your search as wide as possible.

SingingFish Media Lists

On the right-hand column on the SingingFish home page, we have mouseover buttons for Most Popular Searches, Top Recent Searches, Staff Favorites, and My Saved Searches. Wave your mouse over these buttons (they're not clickable) and the list below changes. You can click on any of the items in the various lists that appear, and SingingFish will take you directly to the search results for that item.

For example, I was interested in Wallace and Gromit, one of the Staff Favorites, and found a few movie trailers and other good stuff.

I'm Bored, SingingFish

One of the most fun things to do with SingingFish is to fool around with the I'm Bored button on the front page. However, be careful - this button goes to random sites that SingingFish staff have selected, not a SingingFish destination, so when you "Click to play something guaranteed to make you say, "huh", expect something to start playing.

This article is continued on page two.