Yahoo! Audio Search, a Music Pioneer? - How the Search Works
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The strangest thing about the Y! Audio Search is that all the search refinement tools are presented on the results page. The search is initiated simply by entering some text, as there are no other options. However, the top of the results page lists the following:
The top set of links is pretty useful on the results page. In an ideal world, Music would list all the subscription music services that match your search criteria; Podcasts would list any podcasts including songs or speeches that match; Other Audio would list web results that cannot be classified in the earlier sets. At least that’s my impression, since there doesn’t seem to be any other logic to it yet. In reality, podcasts works pretty well, but the other two blur together too much. Music contains subscription music, freebies, and occasionally random web results. Other Audio has a large share of music results from subscription sites. This spill over that makes these two categories too similar is probably an issue Y! needs to fix before they take the search engine out of beta.
The other options above, the blue box of radio buttons, is a bit more questionable. Sure, it’s good to set those features, but the fact they are radio buttons is truly annoying. It means you can only select one at a time. Using checkboxes would be more effective, as I’d like to select all file formats except RAM.
It’s odd that Y! chose to put these refinement tools on the results page only. After performing the search, users have to then select file format and wait for the page to reload, then select duration or source and wait for the page to reload. It’s nice to be able to refine results without restarting a search, but this doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t Y! put the search refinement tools on the front page of the search too. I want to get the most relevant results right at the start, instead of refining repeatedly to get them better yet, set the search to remember my preferences: no Real Audio and files less than 1 minute.
It would also be nice to have a way to order the results, like listing with the highest bitrate first or the smallest file size first. But there are deeper issues with the results pages that may need to be resolved first.
Next: Sifting Through Results >>
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