Find what you want, not what they think you want

Convergence Culture:To find specialist web content, you need to surf past Google, writes Haydn Shaughnessy

If you've heard about the exciting new content available on the World Wide Web but don't quite know how to find it, join the club. The downside of the recent explosion in film clips, music and art is that "quality" is both hard to define and hard to find. Adding to the puzzle is the fact that, because of the web, our tastes are not constant. When you start exploring long-dormant interests, your perspective and requirements change, ever so slightly, your curiosity grows and you're harder to satisfy.

The traditional answer to any search need is Google. Use it for movies, though, and you'll stumble across an issue plaguing content searching: most search engines end up pointing you in the direction of content that the majority of people like. In other words, it does little to highlight the minority interests that the new system is supposed to encourage.

Go instead to the new video search engine dabble.com. Dabble is like a group of friends deciding together what's good. First, Dabble allows you to search 300 video upload sites across the web. It also allows you to create a playlist of your favourite movies and to search the playlists of people who have collections that mirror your tastes. What you find comes from tracking the browsing habits of other users. It's a social process. Better still, you can post a request for content.

Blinkx.com is a similar search facility but has an additional tool, Pico, to help you find content. Download Pico and you can set up your own smart search folders. Pico will then recommend sites that are similar to those you've selected.

You can choose also to go direct to sites like Brightcove.com, which hosts high quality videos for broadcasters such as Sky and for bands, newspapers and TV stations. Blip.tv (I've just been watching the pilot episode of sitcom Break a Leg there), the Internet Archive, and Democracy Player are three of 300-plus options you might want to browse. Tioti and tvext.tv are new TV show search engines yet to get up and running but worth keeping an eye on.

Or you have options such as jumptv.com which aggregates TV channels from all over the world.

Music fans can access similar types of services. Pandora.com is a Pico-type service that recommends music based on the genres you choose to listen to. If, for example, you select a Beatles record on the Pandora homepage the system will propose a number of 1960s light popular bands to go with it. It gave me Dion! Switch to Greenday and it will follow with more recommendations, building a personal radio channel for you. Last.fm is the current buzz in music because it creates communities around artists and genres.

Blogging is the new poetry so maybe you want to find a writer up there on the web that talks your kind of language. Hooking on to a good blogger can be tricky. There are currently 55 million of them.

Blog aggregators help you pick a way through. Aggregators are sites that bring together a number of bloggers and put up a (sometimes small) editorial hurdle that bloggers have to get over. B5.com, Weblogsinc.com, blogher.com (for women bloggers), and blogsisters.com, are all aggregators.

Podnova, gigadial.net, and podcastpickle are three of a small number of sites that do the same for podcasts.

Finally, there are social bookmarking sites where visitors to interesting pages leave a trail for you to find.

For example, if you go to del.icio.us and enter the term art, you'll find half a million sites that previous websurfers have recommended by "tagging" the page with the word art. Put in cubism and you'll find only 147 sites, each of them a relevant link to a webpage covering cubism. On del.icio.us you can piggyback on other people's searches.

One thing to bear in mind is that discovery will have the inevitable effect of changing your viewing and reading habits. So finding good content, as much as it is about using good search techniques, is also about keeping an open mind.

Haydn Shaughnessy edits the online magazine wripe.net. Next week: living in the virtual world

Words in Your Ear

• Video search engines:What Google does for text and images, dabble and blinkx do for video

• Tags/tagging:Keywords that you give to a video or podcast that allows other people to find them

• Aggregators:Sites that bring together a select choice of podcast, blogs, video sites or other content

• Social bookmarking:Sites where you can post bookmarks and tags that act as a trail for other people to follow