« Previous post
Next post »

May 7, 2007

Yahoo Adds Lyrics Shortcut to Search

Michael Arrington

17 comments »

Yahoo began publishing the music lyrics on Yahoo Music last week - the first time they appear legally on the Internet. Today they announced a Yahoo search shortcut to find song lyrics very quickly.

Just type an artist name or song name and “+ lyrics” to see lyric results for the artist or song above other search results. See, for example, lyrics for the Beatles, U2 and the Smiths.

Yahoo Lyrics are not perfect - copyright restrictions force them to show lyrics as an image instead of free text, to avoid scraping. This prevents search engine indexing as well, though.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. ProHipHop - Hip Hop Marketing

    May 7th, 2007 at 8:04 pm

  2. Total BS

    May 7th, 2007 at 8:11 pm

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Adam Benayoun

    May 7th, 2007 at 3:00 pm

    Interesting move from Yahoo!, analyze search trend, find the most popular then redirect the majority of it by adding a shortcut at the top.

  2. Steve S

    May 7th, 2007 at 3:04 pm

    As long as its accurate this is not a bad play on Yahoo’s part and an interesting way to workaround the copyright issues.

  3. ted

    May 7th, 2007 at 3:04 pm

    Nice job by Yahoo! Now they ought to go after the thousands of illegal lyrics sites :)

  4. KillerStartups.com

    May 7th, 2007 at 3:07 pm

    Given the fact that lyrics.com is in an interesting upward trend to Alexa 2,000 (see Alexa’s chart http://www.alexa.com/data/deta.....84&y=8) it clearly shows users interest in lyrics. Maybe Yahoo has “inside information” about growing user trends (owning a search engine helps, lol).
    An interesting niche to see how it evolves. If Yahoo is doing it, it means something potentially big is in the works?

    Gonzalo

  5. Steve S

    May 7th, 2007 at 3:10 pm

    Indeed, they could also have just found a major data niche that Google hasn’t moved into yet and want to exploit it before they do. It is interesting to be sure.

  6. vaspers the grate

    May 7th, 2007 at 3:54 pm

    Laughing myself into vertigo over “lyric scraping”. What will the mammonist, miserly RIAA think of next?

    Nice to see that lurching and lunging, we are all moving inexorably toward Universal Content Utopia, soon to be All Free All the Time.

    ~]-||||:|

  7. vaspers the grate

    May 7th, 2007 at 3:55 pm

    MetroLyrics has provided free lyrics widgets for blogs for a long time. Not sure what the legal status of it is.

  8. vaspers the grate

    May 7th, 2007 at 3:58 pm

    We have been able to have music mp3 players on our blogs, with a MetroLyrics widget presenting the words of the song…for a long long time.

    We have been mashing and hybriding new tools of musical nature for a long time. It’s all over the place, in the underground and the cults I create.

  9. vaspers the grate

    May 7th, 2007 at 4:01 pm

    As music, poetry, films, everything in the Universe, becomes easier, faster, and cheaper to make (I make all my computer noise music with only Audacity audio editor sine waves, etc., w/very rare use of Casio synth) and distribute…

    we will be seeing a Share Economy that will make Marx look like Daddy Warbucks and the ultra rich and ultra poor are Western metaphysics categories that will perish along with Power and Domination Systems.

  10. Kevin

    May 7th, 2007 at 5:09 pm

    I hate to be off topic, but what ever happened to slacker.com? Mike, you went crazy over them a couple months back and I think rightfully so. The site hasn’t been up in at least a month. What’s the deal?

  11. Useless...

    May 7th, 2007 at 5:14 pm

    I don’t understand yahoo. Sometimes they come across bright, other times just annoying.. on the basic level. I have a feeling the Lyrics additional will not take off as expected unless they make one big change.

    a) it would be nice to be able to “copy” and “paste” lyrics, as of right now it’s an image with text in it? why would you do this?
    b) more people search for lyrics to “copy” and “paste” them into emails, end of posts, quotes for articles, Karaoke, LD discs etc.

    think about it!

  12. Gerald S

    May 7th, 2007 at 5:26 pm

    Techmambo is a site dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies.In addition to this, we also profile existing companies that are working hard to make products/services more usable for the rest of us. Techmambo is edited by Gerald Shuma.

  13. Gerald S

    May 7th, 2007 at 5:40 pm

    Techmambo is a site dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies.In addition to this, we also profile existing companies that are working hard to make products/services more usable for the rest of us. Techmambo is edited by Gerald Shuma.

    http://www.techmambo.blogspot.com

  14. Who Cares....

    May 7th, 2007 at 10:58 pm

    Gofish did this almost 2 years ago. Big Whoopie!

    http://blog.searchenginewatch......622-114000

  15. ClintJCL

    May 11th, 2007 at 11:12 am

    http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/.....s-instead/

    ^^^ My review of Yahoo Lyrics site. Conclusion: It’s crap.

    The verdict is out:

    Yahoo Lyrics is harder to use, finds FAAAAAAAAAAR fewer results, and gives you those results in a useless format (JPG instead of TXT) when compared to EvilLyrics.

    Get EvilLyrics instead.

« Previous post
Next post »