Yahoo starts testing an audio search service that scours the databases of major and independent music publishers and can also hunt for podcasts, reviews and other content.
Yahoo starts testing an audio search service that searches major music-company databases and also hunts for podcasts, reviews and other content.
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Yahoo Inc. on Thursday started testing an audio search service that scours the databases of major and independent music publishers and can also hunt for podcasts, reviews and other content. The Sunnyvale, Calif., web portal said the beta service searches more than 50 million audio files in companies that have opened their content up to Yahoo.
Besides Yahoo's own music store, the new service's index also includes content from eMusic, GarageBand.com, Napster and RealNetworks's Rhapsody. Yahoo has integrated its service into its own search engines for video, images and news.
Independent publishers can submit content to the audio index through an RSS, or really simple syndication, feed. RSS is a technology based on extensible markup language, or XML, for distributing and updating content on the web.
Yahoo is not the first to offer audio search. Similar services are available through America Online's SingingFish and Blinkx. Yahoo, however, claims its index is the most comprehensive.
"With Yahoo Audio Search, users have a starting point for finding all audio related content available on the Web making it easy for users to find, use, share and expand their knowledge of audio-related content," John Thrall, head of multimedia search engineering at Yahoo Search, said in a statement.
Besides audio, video search has also been a focus for portals Yahoo, AOL and others. Google Inc. offers video search, but hasn't launched a similar music service.
The increasing amount of audio and video on the web is a reflection of the Internet's shift from mostly web pages to offering multimedia entertainment.
