Yahoo! Search delivers free Rhapsody music playback

Stephen Withers
Friday, 19 September 2008 08:04

Your IT - Home IT

The Search Wars continue: Yahoo!'s latest thrust is to deliver full music tracks among the search results for artists. Will this help the Yahooligans strike back against the Google empire?

Since Google stormed the search stage, Yahoo! has been trying hard to stay in the game. Search is really about advertising, and so both companies have increasingly turned to content (eg, Google's acquisition of YouTube and its subsequent inclusion in search results) as a way of enhancing users' search experience.

The new Yahoo! Search music playback feature is being delivered in collaboration with Rhapsody, the music service jointly owned by RealNetworks and MTV Networks.

A search for an artist with 'available content' will result in a boxed result at the top of the list, containing a brief list of full-length tracks.

When we tried this on The Beach Boys, the listed tracks were I Get Around, Kokomo, California Girls, and Good Vibrations.

Clicking one of those links invokes the FoxyTunes Player, which is superimposed upon the content at the lower left of the browser window. The search results can be scrolled without disturbing the player.

According to Yahoo! officials, more than five million tracks are available for playback in this way.

Surely there's a catch? There is, but it's not a massive one. See page two.