All About Content

Google has added music search feature than can be accessed via its regular search interface. The search engine is now supposed to be better at telling the difference between music-related searches and regular searches that just happen to contain words also found in lyrics.

“You might be thinking, ‘Why can’t I just type in an album name or a song name and get the same music search results?’” wrote David Alpert, search quality product manager at Google, in a blog posting.

“There are many album names and songs which are also plain English words,” he added. “Sometimes users are looking for music information related to those words, and sometimes they aren’t.”

Supposedly, the “the results are displayed with a musical note next to them” and “will provide more information about artists, album cover art, reviews, and links to stores where users can download a track or buy a CD, according to a Red Herring article.

When I tried right now, it only worked when I was looking up popular artists, not song lyrics or title or smaller bands. Instead of a musical note (did they mean note as in symbol used for musical notation?), I see a thumbnail of cover art, with some info and a link to take you to specialized search results; it is not very clear that the first link takes you to another set of search results and not a page, but the music SERPs look good. Uncluttered, sortable by release date and popularity, album details and, in a separate column, links to the artists’ official sites.

Once you’re on one of those music SERPs you can restrict your search to just a music, but there is no intuitive way to do that from the regular interface, like you can with images and news (toggle using the links above the search box) or Book Search (currently there’s a link at the bottom of every regular search results page). The pages on which you can restrict your search to just music aren’t branded with a Google Music beta logo, so it doesn’t look like it’s a full blown specialized search function. But you can backward engineer the URL — http://www.google.com/musicsearch — and bookmark it.

But for my money, Yahoo is ahead of the game on this one with its Yahoo Audio Search (use the link above the search box), which lets you search for music or podcasts, and provides links to samples, single-song downloads and a bunch more useful info.