Disclosed is a multimedia searching method and apparatus that can achieve a high performance and provide a interoperability by defining a histogram using uniformly quantized bin values as a standard histogram, and a comparative search can be performed using a search histogram having non-uniformly-quantized bin values based on the standard histogram. The non-uniformly quantized bin values of the search histogram can be determined for each application by non-uniformly combining the uniformly-quantized bin values. According to a method, the histogram is defined as a standard histogram, and a comparative search is performed by converting the standard histogram. Further, a standard histogram obtained by uniformly quantizing a given color space can be converted into a search histogram (e.g., determined for a certain application) by non-uniformly combining the bins obtained by uniformly quantizing the color space into the N partial regions.