If you’re like me, your life pretty much has a soundtrack. (For some reason, my soundtrack plays almost exclusively in my head and consists largely of music from before I was born.) Now, the SERPs are even more like your life—Yahoo had added in-SERP full music tracks. Before, you could play only 30-second previews.

Old shortcut:

New shortcut:

You can play up to 25 of the new full-length tracks in Yahoo SERPs per month. The tracks are available through a partnership with Rhapsody, which will also provide unlimited song plays for $13/month. Yahoo says the full-length tracks will soon be available in Yahoo Music, too.

Listening to the tracks in the SERP launches Yahoo’s new media player, FoxyPlayer, at the bottom of the browser window:

I’ll admit, I expected it would take Microsoft a lot longer to start integrating Powerset’s search technology with Live Search–but the company is announcing the first of the new features.

Freebase Answers Integration

First-up, Live Search Answers will use Powerset to bring in results from Freebase Answers. Freebase looks to be a cross between Wikipedia and Google’s Knols.

Better Wikipedia Captions

I’d hardly call this exciting, but apparently some of the $200 million paid for Powerset will help Live Search better display Wikipedia results. [Yawn!]

Related Searches

"Related searches" have been around for eons. Still, Microsoft is excited to join the year 2008, with Powerset’s Factz.

If you have Yahoo set as your homepage–or just happen to visit Yahoo.com often–you may see this new design starting tomorrow:

Yahoo has announced it will start testing a new homepage design with a small group of Yahoo users. Here’s what you’ll get:

1. One easy check-in point. We’re testing a dashboard area (off to the left) that will let you add previews of your favorite Yahoo! and non-Yahoo! services – starting with checking for new mail from multiple accounts (initially Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail and Gmail, with more to come), weather forecasts, and local events. We plan to add plenty more preview applications in the future, so that you don’t have to spend as much time jumping from site to site just to stay plugged in.

Whether you loved the Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates TV ads or hated them, you want be seeing any more of them–they’ve been axed.

Actually, the official word is that Microsoft had planned all along to only make a couple of Seinfeld ads–before moving on to the next stage of its TV campaign. Whether you buy that or not, here’s what you can expect on your screens next:

What follows is an audacious embrace of the disdainful label that Apple, Microsoft’s rival, has gleefully — and successfully — affixed onto users of Microsoft products: “I’m a PC.”

One new Microsoft commercial even begins with a company engineer who resembles John Hodgman, the comedian portraying the loser PC character in the Apple campaign. “Hello, I’m a PC,” the engineer says, echoing Mr. Hodgman’s recurring line, “and I’ve been made into a stereotype.”