The Search Engine Wars Continue

The boys and girls at Yahoo and Google are working overtime to not only improve their respective products, but looking for new ways to search for previously unsearchable items.

To start, Yahoo is developing a search engine for finding music data and downloadable songs from across the Internet. The search giant plans to introduce the music search engine within the next couple of months, according to a well-placed source. The specialty engine will let people search on an artist's name and retrieve all the available songs from other music services, as well as album reviews and band information from Yahoo Music. Yahoo considers audio and video to be cornerstones of its future. In addition to buying song outlet MusicMatch for $160 million, Yahoo is working on another music service in conjunction with rival MusicNet.

But wait, were not done. Both Yahoo and Google turned to video search this week, with each company touting more searchable content and superstar partnerships. Yahoo released a finalized version of its video search engine, after five months of testing. The company will also announce alliances with CBS News, MTV, Reuters and others to include their video clips within its searchable database.

Meanwhile, Google announced a string of new liaisons with television programmers, including the Discovery Channel and CNN, so that people can find still images and text of their shows in Google's index. The company, however, is continuing public tests of Google Video, which launched in January.

Google is also seeking to patent a technology meant to help its Google News section sort stories based on their overall quality, which would augment the current methods of ranking results by date and relevance to search terms. In separate filings with the U.S. and world patent offices, Google detailed the new ranking formula. The technology would let Google prerank content from specific news outlets to ensure that those stories appear above other search results.

And the winner of this consumate search engine rivalry...all of us.