Article by George Norman

On 29 Oct 2009

I love music, you love music, everybody loves music – and apparently this includes two of the big names in the search engine world, mainly Yahoo! and Google. Starting with Yahoo!, the company showed its love for music in two ways:

1. Yahoo! Messenger v. 8.1, v. 9 and v. 10 users can control their music player and let their friends know what music they’re listening to thanks to the newly released FoxyTunes plugin – the same plugin that has been available to Mac OS X users for some time now. The plugin is available for download straight from Yahoo! – just click here.
2. Yahoo! Search has been modified to help users find music videos and artist information a lot easier. On top of that, Yahoo! Search has been modified so that users can play full length songs within the search results page.


“This is just one of the many ways Yahoo! is enhancing the search experience for music lovers. With Search Assist, Search Monkey, and Yahoo! Shortcuts, you can discover even more relevant information about your favorite artist. At Yahoo! Search, our goal is to give you a more personally relevant search experience. We are also continuing our investment in structuring the Web to allow you to explore a “Web of things,” more than just a Web of pages. That includes helping you find and explore everything there is to know about your favorite music artists,” explained Vice President of Consumer Products with Yahoo! Search, Larry Cornett.

Moving on, Mountain View-based search engine giant Google has showed its love for music by officially launching built-in music playback on the search results page. According to Google, the number 1 most popular search query for the past 5 years is “lyrics”. It goes without saying then that the search engine had to be modified to better address the users’ love for music.

“We’re rolling out a search feature that [enables] you to search and more easily discover millions of songs, all via a simple Google web search. Now, when you enter a music-related query — like the name of a song, artist or album — your search results will include links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search partners. When you click the result you'll be able to listen to an audio preview of the song directly from one of those partners,” explained Murali Viswanathan, Product Manager and Ganesh Ramanarayanan, Software Engineer with Google.

The changes made to Google Search continue. If you cannot remember the name of a song, simply type in the chorus or the lyrics you can remember, or just the name of the artist. Google Search will easily find the song you meant to find. If you want to discover music, Google has partnered with Pandora, imeem and Raphsody; consequently the Google Search results include links to the sites of these partners. On their sites you can easily discover music related to your query.

“Of course, this is just a first step toward making search more musical. There's a lot of music out there in the world, and in some instances, we may not return links to the song you're looking for. But by combining the strength of Google's search algorithms with our music search partners' efforts to increase the comprehensiveness of their music content, we're on track to answer more of your rhymes with the right rhythms. We'll be rolling this feature out gradually to users across the U.S.,” added Viswanathan and Ramanarayanan.



Tags: Yahoo!, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Messenger, FoxyTunes, Google, Google Search, Music

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