Yahoo introduced last week beta software for audio search to help Internet uses track down music downloads, podcasts, newscasts, speeches and interviews.
Yahoo Audio Search features a variety of music-related search files, including music videos, albums and artists’ Web sites. Audio and video search are two areas that Yahoo is heavily investing in, as competition with Google heats up.
Yahoo, for example, announced plans last year to buy Musicmatch for $160 million. The new audio search feature will be integrated with other Yahoo search categories, such as video, images and news.
Independent publishers will be allowed to submit content to Yahoo’s audio index, which will include more than 50 million audio files. Yahoo Audio Search will also let users save their audio searches via Yahoo’s My Web 2.0, a social search engine. This lets users share their musical preferences with others by using RSS feeds of their saved Web pages.
