Yahoo Searchmonkey Expands with Playable Music Tracks

Back in June, I wrote about how Yahoo was attempting to turn the search engine concept on its head with its Searchmonkey platform. This involved giving the searcher more information on the page and making the results more relevant, accurate, user-friendly and visually appealing.

Well now Yahoo is going one step further by introducing the ability for users to listen to full length music tracks inside Yahoo search results. Before you get all excited and sell your iPod on eBay, there is a limit though (as always). You can only listen to 25 free songs per month. Any more than that and you have to sign up for the Rhapsody Service which costs $12.99 a month.

But this is still very useful if you are doing search engine queries for a singer / band and you are wondering if you have the right person or the right song. Or if someone recommends a singer / band to you and you want to listen to a sample of their music. You can now listen to some songs inside the Yahoo search results. If you stay within that 25 songs per month limit, it won’t cost you a thing.

To try it out, just enter the name of a singer or a band into Yahoo. Being a newly introduced feature, it doesn’t have songs for everyone at the moment. They have songs for my favourite band, U2, but not for my girlfriend’s favourite, Runrig. But I entered some big names into the search engine - Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and they had songs for them. But surprisingly, there was nothing for Eric Clapton. What a scandal! :-() But give Yahoo a bit of time and I’m sure they will eventually have songs for everyone.

If there are songs available, you’ll get a box identical to the one above. If you see the song you want to play, just click on it and a player will open at the bottom of the screen :

Click on the “play” button and the song will start. Easy.

I am constantly amazed at the developments of Search Monkey and at how fast Yahoo Search is developing. If Google doesn’t start changing and developing their search pages for the semantic web, they’re going to get seriously left behind! They should stop making internet browsers (which they’re not really that good at) and instead concentrate on developing their search engine (which they are REALLY good at). What do you think?

(By) Mark O'Neill is a freelance writer, blogger and the editor of Make Use Of. Check out his blog at Better Than Therapy.

Filed Under: Cool Websites
Tags: Google, music, search engines, Yahoo