Yahoo’s makin’ a lotta noise with their new audio search. Other search engines have audio searches but Yahoo is the biggest one to pick up the audio search so far. This search will include downloadable music, podcasts, news interviews, historical recordings and lots of others. The one basic rule is no peer to peer listings.

So legitimate listings abound, what kind of sound are you searching for? I did a little rudimentary research and began looking for various types of sounds. It’s amazing what’s in there. I typed Dr. Hook and a number of songs came up so I thought, ok, let’s make it tougher. Then I tried Mojo Nixon and that came up with quite a few choices as well.

Next I tried other things. I typed in Lyndon Johnson and I find interviews with Johnson. Richard Nixon produced a similar result. I tried Teddy Roosevelt. One thing that came up was a link to the Smithsonian to download a version of his old campaign song for a century ago. I’m still not sure how they coded the music on the little wax cylinders back then. I didn’t realize machine code had been developed for Thomas Edison.

Much to my chagrin, when I typed in weird noises, they didn’t have nearly as creative an offering as I would’ve hoped. The same went for rude noises or gross noises. Fortunately lots of Dr. Demento offerings fulfilled my hope for the new form of search.

With search moving further and further along, looking for more stuff all the time, Yahoo is on a great path to do that. Other search engine entities like Alta Vista and Lycos offer audio searches as well but Yahoo is the first of the big three search engines to tackle the issue. Whether Google or MSN will pick up this search feature remains to be seen but one can assume that if Yahoo has some success with it, then the others probably will.

John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.