Yahoo!'s extremely interesting new engine both invigorates and disappoints. The promise of easily finding online media in a general search engine is tantalizing, but, of course, truly gratifying results are impossible. The Chinese search engine giant Baidu recently tried to make a splash in the U.S. with its MP3-enabled engine, and the unsuing tumult forced the company to take down its music-finding service within a day. Yahoo! Audio Search steers clear of potential entanglements with the RIAA by providing a copyright-safe scan of authorized music services (iTunes Music Store, Rhapsody, Napster, BuyMusic, etc.). Result links go to those services, and are spiced by an occasional direct-streaming link to short clips provided by Loudeye.

Search results are broken into three sections: Music, Podcasts, and Other Audio. The podcast results are accurate, and include RSS links, but seem to be a few weeks behind the current podcast episode. Some podcasts I find easily in iTunes 4.9 do not appear in Yahoo! Audio Search. for frequent searching, there's a bigger problem. When linking to a result outside of a firewalled music service (such as a news audio clip archived on a newspaper site), Yahoo! Audio does not provide a Play Audio link similar to the Play Video link in Yahoo! Video—this is a disappointment and an inconvenience. It can be hard to find an archived clip on a busy Web page.