In this paper we present the Intangible Heritage Information System and its role in building two web sites developed to consult multimedia ethnographical archives, composed of text, images, audios and videos. The web sites offer several retrieval strategies for querying the multimedia database exploiting alphanumeric relational query, and similarity search. We compare two different ways of browsing and searching UNESCO intangible heritage objects on the web, that draw data from the same database at different levels of depth, from the Archive of Ethnography and Social History of the Lombardy Region.