Thursday, December 15, 2005

Google’s Direct Music Results

This music “OneBox” result on top of Google is new. It appears whenever you’re searching for an artist – like “U2”, or “Michael Jackson” – and displays a thumbnail of the artist or band, as well as a snippet listing some of their albums and songs. Click on “More results” and you will be taken to a details page with more album titles.

Now, when you click on an album you will be taken to the album info page... which interestingly enough contains links to “Artist websites” (a Google web search result for the band name), “Latest news” (a Google News search result), “Artist photos” (Google Images, of course), and “Discuss this artist” (Google Groups). Sometimes, there’s a “Buy album” link for Wal-Mart and Amazon.

For some albums, you also see a track list with the titles as links. A link will take you to a page containing a “fair use” snippet of the lyrics with links to further lyrics websites. Also, some albums contain reviews and average ratings (up to 5 gold stars, similar to what Google has been doing with movies for a while now).

[Thanks Ionut Alex. Chitu.]

Update: Note you can also directly use the “music:” operator, e.g. music:google would find Barney Google songs, the artist Mr. Google Eyes, or the album Google Plex by Astroid Power-Up. The music search page can also be accessed directly. [Thanks József Jároli.]

Google’s Direct Music Res ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (3)

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