Multimedia search enables information search using search queries in multiple data types including text and other multimedia formats. Multimedia search can be implemented through multimodal search interfaces, i.e., interfaces that allow to submit search queries not only as textual requests, but also through other media. This is often referred to as Search by example, because the typical interaction consists in submitting a piece of information (e.g., a video, an image, or a piece of audio) at the purpose of finding similar multimedia items.
Multimedia search includes:
Audio search is a search where you can search for songs and music. Visual search is a search where you can search for videos and pictures.
The most major search engines give the user the opportunity to search for audio, video and pictures. However, most of them only allow to search with a mono-modal interaction, based on textual keyword search.