1 Looking for The Next Great Band An inside look at Yahoo! Audio Search March 5, 2006 Michael Spiegelman

2 Media Search 101 Web crawlers find media files across the web Metadata from the file and surrounding text is read File is copied and stored in specific indexes with associated metadata URLs and metadata are served in response to user queries Content can also be gathered by feeds or by users setting up feeds (e.g. Yahoo!) or uploading content directly (e.g. Google)

3 What Yahoo! Audio Search is doing differently Uses audio file recognition to identify what a file is Groups files into known concepts (artist, album, song) Works across services (e.g. iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, Yahoo!) as well as web content Allows users to submit music directly using Media RSS format

4 What it looks like

5 What it all means Audio Search is optimized for finding music The index is open – anyone can send us their music, even if they don’t have a website It’s the longtail that’s important Users can compare services side-by-side

6 Where we’re going Make it easier to discover longtail content Demystify digital music services and help users make good choices Build the larger ecosystem of longtail music on Yahoo! and the rest of the Internet

7 A final plug Help us to build dope shit! We’re hiring developers Contact: