Searches for music videos and artists on Yahoo.com now bring up a special OneBox that allows users to hear music and play videos from Yahoo! Music within the search results page itself.
As shown in the screenshot below, the video onebox has a sizeable presence over the organic search results. The OneBox features a photograph of the artist, links to the official artist website as well as albums, lyrics, photos and videos from Yahoo! Music. Users can listen to a selection of up to 3 tracks from the artist by clicking on the play button next to the track name, and it plays the song within the search results page itself.
Users can also click to view one of the 3 videos featured below the artist photograph. The video opens in a layer on the same page, without launching a new window, as shown in the screen capture below. When users close the video layer they get returned to the search results page, which remains darkened in the background while the video plays.
The new feature was first spotted by Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped. Interestingly, the new video onebox also provides a link in the bottom right of the box to the Yahoo! Audio search results for the artist, allowing Yahoo! to promote two services in one box.
Old-style video search results are still being shown in the UK. The same search, for artists Linkin Park, in the UK generated the results page shown below, with a much smaller OneBox result that allows users to click to play a video in a new window that essentially opens the Yahoo! Music page for that tune.
While this new feature is a marked improvement for Yahoo! search, it is not as sophisticated as Ask or Google’s universal search results format.
