Okay, now this is cool: When you search for a musical artist or group using Yahoo Search, you may get a box at the top of the results that lets you listen to songs—full songs, not samples, and without leaving the search results. It’s done through a partnership with Rhapsody, and you can listen to up to 25 free songs a month, no registration or other heavy lifting required.

Here, for instance, is what I got when I searched for The Doors:

You get a total of four songs per artist/group, and have no control over what they are when I tried the “More Songs” link above, it led to Yahoo Music, which offers 30-second samples, not whole songs. (On the other hand, Rhapsody lets you listen to up to 25 songs of your choice a month, so if you have a hankering to listen to something specific, you probably can.)

The feature isn’t pervasive, at least not yet: I got songs for many of the performers I searched for, but not all. It seems to focus on pop musicians, and doesn’t cover all of ’em. Here are some searches that didn’t work for me:

It’s possible that the feature is rolling across Yahoo’s servers as we speak: The first time I tried one of the suggested searches, for the Mars Volta, I got no songs. And the second time, I did.

The feature doesn’t appear to do one thing that seems pretty darn logical: let you search for a song, and then play it back from within the results. I mean, if you’re searching for the title of a song, aren’t the chances reasonably high that you’d enjoy listening to it?

This new feature may not be perfect, but it’s still cool. One of the biggest challenges in search–assuming you’re not Google–is to come up with compelling features that might lure searchers away from Google and to your site. I think Yahoo has such a feature here; when I search for music from now on, I’m a lot more likely to head its way…

 
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