Munax was a

Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...

company that developed a Large Hyper-Parallel Execution (LHPE)

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

system Munax XE. Munax XE, is an all-content search engine and powered nationwide and worldwide public search engines with page, document, audio, video, images, software, and email search. Other customers included

vertical search A vertical search engine is distinct from a general web search engine, in that it focuses on a specific segment of online content. They are also called specialty or topical search engines. The vertical content area may be based on topicality, media ...

engines and mobile operators. For

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradition ...

, Munax also developed functionality that let the visitors pre-listen to audio and preview videos, making it easier for the visitor to decide what song or video he is looking for before playing it, or visiting the site hosting it. The visitor could also decide to

transcode Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for video data files, audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859). This is usually done in cases where a target devic ...

any multimedia file to make it moveable to the mobile phone or any type of multimedia player.

History

While working as a consultant for larger high tech companies, Jan-Olof Granlund spent his free time working on a specification for a search engine technology. The goal was to (1) develop a number of new algorithms for ranking independent of the type of data and (2) efficient distribution and scaling of processing power and data over a large cluster of servers. The specification was ready in 2004 and the first beta search engine system was implemented in 2005 and a license was sold to a search engine company on

Iceland Iceland ( is, Ísland; ) is a Nordic island country in the North Atlantic Ocean and in the Arctic Ocean. Iceland is the most sparsely populated country in Europe. Iceland's capital and largest city is Reykjavík, which (along with its s ...

. In 2007, the company Munax AB was founded and Granlund left his consultant business to work full-time in the new company. Munax had shareholders from

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...

, the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

, and

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

. The major investor in Munax was :sv:Affärsstrategerna. The technology of the Munax company was later sold and the company was closed down.

Munax features

On the system level, Munax can be installed on a single

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

or an arbitrary number of computers on a local area network, or over computers on the internet. The execution is logically distributed over subsystems, not machines. One machine can host several subsystems or one subsystem can span over several machines. This way, Munax can be scaled and distributed freely and each machine's execution power can be utilized to its maximum. On the indexing level, Munax full-indexes a range of document types, including: htm html shtm shtml jhtm asp php php3 pdf ps doc xls ppt rtf wp wp5 wp6 wpd txt c cpp h. When it comes to link-indexing in Munax, this is more complex than just indexing the anchor text and the URL. Amongst other things, Munax relates each link to the other links on the page and to the text of the page itself. Munax supports the link-indexing of gif, jpg, tga, bmp, iff, img, jif, mac, msp, pcx, pic, tif, ico, jpe, mp3, wav, ram, snd, mp4, aif, mid, vqf, la1, lav, mp2, avi, mpg, mpeg, rm, qt, asx, mov, fli, flc, eps, wri, asc, fmk, for, zip, gzip, tar, arc, lzh, sit, rar, arj, dd, tgz, lha, exe, hqx, dll, vbs, vxd, bat, cmd, class, jar, java, jav and email addresses. Munax knows what type of files these are and groups them accordingly. Munax also allows for structured indexing, i.e. the indexing of

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

files and automatically creates each xml tag as an individual search item. On the search level, several independent ranking algorithms processes the

inverted index In computer science, an inverted index (also referred to as a postings list, postings file, or inverted file) is a database index storing a mapping from content, such as words or numbers, to its locations in a table, or in a document or a set of d ...

together with hundreds of search parameters to produce the final ranking for each document. For the visitor, Munax provided a long range of search features, including the search for pages, documents, audio, video, images, compressed files, torrents, software and email addresses, or to get all type of results on the same page (composite search, supersearch). The visitor could also decide which ranking algorithms to be used, search across domains, search within sites, before/after/between dates, demand objects-on-page, pre-view & pre-listen to multimedia files and view objects-on-page and pages with the tags stripped away.

PlayAudioVideo

Munax started the construction of the PlayAudioVideo

search engine in July 2007 and opened it for beta testers in December the same year. PlayAudioVideo, beta 1, was opened for the public in February 2008 and beta 2 opened in June 2008. PlayAudioVideo was the first true search engine for multimedia, i.e., providing search on the web for images, video and audio/music in the same search engine. Through Munax composite search, the visitor gets the results for all multimedia types on the same result page, or he could decide to search for each individual type. Audio and Video could be pre-listened and pre-viewed before connecting to the original multimedia file. This saved time when deciding among versions of the same song or video. The visitor could start his own web application and make any search result accessible in any type of device. This includes audio for mp3 players and video and audio for mobile phones and/or VCD/DVD.

Mobile and metasearch

Munax acknowledged the demand from the mobile operators to provide their customers with search beyond the traditional text search. Munax provided the users with the search and play of songs and videos regardless of the type of device being used. For

metasearch engines A metasearch engine (or search aggregator) is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. S ...

, Munax provided any type of search, including traditional text search (pages/documents) and multimedia search, to be presented on their result pages.

Businesses

Munax provided a range of search products to be installed on a corporation's computers, to index their local area network, their website and/or sites on the web. Munax could be tailored individually to suit the needs for each corporation. Munax also provided outsourced search—i.e., any corporation could have their website indexed and searchable from the Munax search engine, but presented as if the search results came from the corporation itself. With or without

authentication Authentication (from ''authentikos'', "real, genuine", from αὐθέντης ''authentes'', "author") is the act of proving an assertion, such as the identity of a computer system user. In contrast with identification, the act of indicati ...

and

encryption In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can decip ...

. The outsourced search functionality was used in the service All Site Search.

Name and logo

MUNAX, from Munin and Corax.
The

scientific name In taxonomy, binomial nomenclature ("two-term naming system"), also called nomenclature ("two-name naming system") or binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, bot ...

for the raven is ''

Corvus corax The common raven (''Corvus corax'') is a large all-black passerine bird. It is the most widely distributed of all corvids, found across the Northern Hemisphere. It is a raven known by many names at the subspecies level; there are at least ei ...

'', as named in

1758 Events January–March * January 1 – Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) publishes in Stockholm the first volume (''Animalia'') of the 10th edition of Systema Naturae, 10th edition of ''Systema Naturae'', the sta ...

Carl Linnaeus Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the ...

, the Swedish biologist who invented the system of classifying organisms by

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

. Munin is one of the two ravens of

Odin Odin (; from non, Óðinn, ) is a widely revered Æsir, god in Germanic paganism. Norse mythology, the source of most surviving information about him, associates him with wisdom, healing, death, royalty, the gallows, knowledge, war, battle, v ...

, the god of wisdom in the Nordic Viking mythology (Viking ages 700–1100 AD). The ravens fly over the earth and remember everything; when the ravens come back, they tell Odin what they have seen—similar to the Munax ravens, or crawlers, which inform the Munax database of what's on the web.

References

Whois for Munax

Munax powers the leading Icelandic search engine

Ericsson Corp., One-stop launched for multimedia searches

The World's first multimedia (audio, video, images) search engine

Munax AB opens the multimedia search engine PlayAudioVideo

PlayAudioVideo, Bigger better and easier to use

Metro Teknik, The first Multimedia search engine

Swedish Munax finds all media files

Swedish company challenges Google on video search

External links

* {{Official website, www.munax.com Internet search engines