Microsoft adds music to Bing search results
23 Jun 2010
Microsoft added another feature to its search engine yesterday - specialised results for music, TV, movies and games.
As far as music search goes, Bing now offers search results similar to what Google offers, but unlike Google Microsoft is independent of parternerships. Google's dependence on partnerships has created some problems.
Cloud-based music service, Lala was acquired by Apple which discontinued it from May this year while iLike (owned by MySpace) only allows users to play the song once. On subsequent visits, users can only listen to a 30-second sample.
On the other hand, Microsoft has entered into licensing deals for its Zune Marketplace service with some deals extended to Bing. Users can now enjoy full-length playbacks for more than 5 million songs.
If they like the song, users can purchase the MP3 from the Zune Marketplace over the web. This is a first time feature from Microsoft (earlier users had to launch the Zune application).
Bing is one up on Google in respect of search results in some other ways as well: artist results serve up embedded biographies, a list of albums (clicking through allows users to get full song listings for each album, with embedded playback for songs that Microsoft has licensed), and where available, lyrics licensed from LyricFind.