Posted on Monday, November 25th, 2013 by Will Hagle
Solayo is a search engine that allows users to search, find and discover great music and video content from YouTube, Soundcloud and other sources, while streaming that content in its native player on the site’s interface.
Solayo is the world’s best music search tool. It features free, streamable audio and visual content from around the internet based upon your media preferences. When you first go to the site, you’re presented with a search bar and instructed to conduct a search for media or paste a YouTube url. After doing a simple search for “Wilco,” I was presented with a wider range of results than I expected. The top result was the “Monsters of Talk Podcast,” which was hosted on SoundCloud and includes an interview with Glenn Kotche and John Stirratt from the band. The second result was Wilco’s NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert, which I could view via a small YouTube window in the corner of Solayo’s interface. Since the site pulls from various online locations such as YouTube and SoundCloud, the results are more diverse than what you might expect from a typical music search tool that hosts its own library. Like many of those libraries, however, there’s also the ability to collect music and build playlists on Solayo.
Radio, Music Videos and Everything Else.One of the best features of Solayo is its ability to play music videos. Each video is presented in a video player designed by Solayo, which can be resized to fit full screen but otherwise sits in a convenient location at the top right of the Solayo interface. This allows users to continue searching for more content while viewing whatever video they’re watching. In addition to the search tools offered by the site, Solayo has a built-in radio feature. 
The stations are organized by genre, and since the site pulls mostly from YouTube and SoundCloud the results can be somewhat unpredictable. Of course, that’s the most exciting thing about listening to the radio— finding something awesome that you’ve never heard before. While more mainstream search tools can return results related to your favorite artists, Solayo is the first search tool I’ve seen that gives you results based on the most important aspect — the content itself.
