Yahoo! Audio Search, a Music Pioneer? - Great Exposure When It Works
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One last note on search results: after clicking one of the links from the list on the last page, you get a listing like the following:
These are from the Music results. The trouble is that the results don’t list all the paid services where songs appear (or maybe I just couldn’t find them because of the problem on the previous page). A more fundamental issue is that some of these services require subscriptions. For those who subscribe, why don’t they just search the service they subscribe to? Yahoo! isn’t that much better at indexing third party content. And if I don’t subscribe to those services, I want an option to exclude those results.
If you search the Other Audio, you may find something like this:
The weird and troublesome thing you may notice is that these two results are the same song. It’s the same URL, the same file format, the same length, and the same file size. Yes, the quality is different, but anyone knows a song with the same length and file size is not going to be different quality (unless it’s VBR). After visiting the site, I can say it’s not VBR and there was only one file with that name. Y! will have to work on the aggregation tools to remove duplicate listings like this. It might also help to have an actual bitrate listed instead of a vague quality slider setting.
Want to get your band’s or clients’ audio indexed? That’s no trouble if you know RSS. Y! only seems to index specific sites for audio and gives individuals a chance to add their own content using an RSS feed submission. This search will be great and can take off when it starts adding content from more web sources. There’s already a lot of audio available on the web that will never have RSS, though Yahoo! might be worried about how to classify it or questions of legality.
Worse, forming an RSS feed is more trouble for bands than it may be worth, especially if they don’t know anything about it yet. Third party optimizers may find some fresh work by helping bands build working feeds for their content. Small bands may not find much better promotion than getting their freebies visible in such a venue.
If Y! can pull this search together, it will be the first functional one of its kind. The most possibility here lies in how well it can index and drill through web results, though perhaps Yahoo! Music Unlimited might get a few more subscribers once Yahoo! actually starts getting its own service into the results more consistently.
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