Oct 22, 2010 18:01 GMT  ·  By

Google Music was just launched, but it's not exactly what you'd expect. This 'Google Music' comes from India and is part of the search engine rather than a dedicated service.

Google Music Search enables users to find the very latest Hindi Bollywood songs as well classic hits and listen to all of them legally.

Google has partnered with several local music services for this and the move is intended to help drive down piracy which, like everywhere else in the developing world, runs rampant.

"Today, we're starting a trial to help you search and explore music across thousands of Hindi Bollywood songs at Google Music Search (India) Labs," Tarkeshwar T., Deepak L., Aravind M., software engineers at Google, and Alok Goel, a product manager, announced.

"You can find the latest Hindi songs, restrict your search to songs from 1980s, listen to songs sung by Kishore Kumar or Shreya Ghoshal or just all songs from the movie Buddha Mil Gaya," they added.

While the service is clearly aimed at the Indian market, the songs are available to everyone around the world and, since the interface is in English, it shouldn't be a problem for most people to use Google Music Search.

Since this is, in essence, a search engine, its strength is lies in finding the music you're looking for, it's not intended as a online music streaming service.

Once you've found the song you want, the player will pop up in a new window enabling you to stream the song. There are no limits on how many times you can listen to a tune.

If you want to get more information or listen to more songs from the artist, you can visit the partner site. The service is ad-supported, small banner ads will be displayed in the player window.

Google is doing something very similar in China where it also runs a music search engine. It also added a music search feature to Google.com which enabled users to listen to song previews. Of course, the Google Music store and online locker service is still coming this year.