Monday, September 3, 2007

Yahoo Video "Onebox"

When you search Yahoo for rammstein videos, the top result will be a “Yahoo Shortcut” show-casing a collection of links, imagery and playable songs & videos. Click on the video thumbnails, and a new player will open right on the results page; click on the songs, and they will start playing instantly. Other links will forward you to the official artists homepage, or Yahoo Music... where you can buy Rammstein songs for $0.99. The shortcut is certainly not unbiased or free of commercial interest.

Now, Google also has a music search onebox – you can see it by entering just rammstein, for instance – but only Yahoo’s “onebox” will allow you to playback the songs right on the page, a very good & relevant feature.

It’s also interesting to contrast this to a Google web search for the same query... which will result in several YouTube videos listed in the results (and you can also playback those right on the page). The YouTube results in Google are so-called organic results, meaning as opposed to a Yahoo Shortcut, Google didn’t precisely specify their ranks (other than by defining general ranking algorithms, which may or may not prefer Google sites due to the way they’re developed). However, in the top 10 organic results over at Yahoo, not a single YouTube.com page is in sight. (Of course, a single query isn’t necessarily representative of any larger scheme.)

[Thanks Razvan Antonescu!]

Yahoo Video "Onebox" by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (3)

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