Thursday, February 26, 2009

Lyric search for Ubiquity

Another simple ubiquity command--similar in method to my attempt at nextmuni--to grab song lyrics from astraweb.com. There's a basic alternative version here, but I thought I'd improve slightly on the simple google search (install link at bottom). I've already found this command handy, and it highlights a great benefit to using Ubiquity for quick lookup tasks like this one... avoid ads!

If tools like Ubiquity become popular across the spectrum of online search (as I imagine they will) what's the implication for ad revenue? I'd worry that search sites and hosts for this type of data might try to combat the trend. The two commands I've written so far are extremely tenuous (though much of that is a result of novice javascript use) in the way they grab their data, and it wouldn't take much more than a change of font-size on my chosen lyrics host to kill the command.

If Ubiquity continues ad-free, there isn't much incentive for search engines and data providers to play along. Unfortunately, this may encourage previously "free" ad-funded services to adopt less open monetization models.

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