Last week, Google made a handful of search-related announcements. In a blog post, it talked about improvements to Knowledge Graph, reminders in iOS and a new mobile design.
At a press event, Google revealed that it had launched a new algorithm called Hummingbird. That is what has gotten the bulk of attention, but Google also mentioned a new song exploration feature. Here’s what that does.
If you type in an artist or band’s name, followed by the word “songs,” you’ll get a much richer search results page than you would have in the past. Google has introduced a carousel feature at the top of the page, enabling the user to quickly browse through a song-list.
If you click on the song, you’ll get a page that looks something like this, which in many cases, will include a YouTube video prominently on the page, where you can listen:
This is interesting, considering often times, these songs as they’re available on YouTube, won’t necessarily be from official channels, but from questionable sources. This could raise some copyright flags with labels.
Either way, the feature shows Google getting smarter at structuring data in a useable way.
It’s unclear how Google is determining which songs to display in the list, however. The list, at least in this example, is far from complete.
[h/t: Search Engine Roundtable]Image: Google