Search, Click Play, Hear Music

Yahoo! Search now offers full song playback directly from the Search results page for thousands of popular artists and songs.

In conjunction with Yahoo! Music’s new partnership with Rhapsody, we are pleased to announce the recent rollout of several improvements to Yahoo! Search’s music artist “WOW” shortcut originally launched in the Fall of 2007.

Now, in addition to gaining access to all of the artist background that you could before, you can also play up to 25 full songs a month, as opposed to the 30-second samples from before. And, by tapping into the vast catalog of songs available on Rhapsody, we’ve expanded the number of audio files that are available for playback and increased the number of tracks in the shortcut from three songs to four. If you want to look over a greater list of songs, you can now link directly to Yahoo! Music right from the shortcuts; full song playback will soon be enabled in Yahoo! Music as well, so stay tuned.

Yahoo! Search is using the FoxyPlayer (formerly known as the Yahoo! Media Player) to power the new Search experience. The player is easy-to-use, offers full functionality for song playback, and includes an expandable playlist tab. Users can continue browsing the results page while the player is in use, as search results will continue to scroll while the player stays in place near the bottom of the browser window. The player can be turned off at any time with a single click, or by simply navigating away from the Search results page. Try it out with a few of my favorites or go to Yahoo! Search and search for your own.

Pink Floyd
Johnny Cash
The Mars Volta

There’s no need to sign in to get your 25 full length streams. Just click a play button and the full length track will start playing. If you listen to all 25 songs before your 30 day period is up, you’ll hear 30 second samples until 30 days have passed from the time you first clicked play. If you are already a Rhapsody Unlimited subscriber, you can listen to an unlimited number of songs through the FoxyPlayer. Just click the “powered by Rhapsody” logo in the player and click the link to sign in on the next page.

We at Yahoo! Music are pleased to have helped Yahoo! Search become the first major Search engine to offer full-song playback directly from the Search results page. We are confident our users will appreciate the enhancements we’ve made to the FoxyPlayer and music artist WOW shortcuts. Keep an eye out for more Rhapsody-related releases down the road, as we are planning several additional updates to showcase even more of Rhapsody’s deep music catalog in the near future.

For more information on our partnership with Rhapsody and how the FoxyPlayer works with Yahoo! Search, check out our help page.

Dave Warmerdam
Yahoo! Music