Apr 1, 2011 15:10 GMT  ·  By
Google music search is dead, but the company is working on something much bigger
   Google music search is dead, but the company is working on something much bigger

Google is still working on its music service, though it seems that Amazon has beat it to the punch, at least as far as the music locker part of the product is concerned. But even as Google struggles to get licensing for selling and streaming music on your computer, tablet and smartphone, other music-related projects have been left to die.

The hyped Google Music search feature it enabled a year and a half ago has been shut down, Google says, temporarily.

But the vague response and the fact that there wasn't any announcement of its demise indicates that the service, in its current form is pretty much done for.

In late 2009, Google made quite a big push with its music search box integrated into the search engine. It was quite powerful too, for any music-related search, you could get more info on the artist or the song.

But the pièce de résistance was the fact that you could listen to previews of the songs inside Google Search and get recommendations for similar songs or artists.

This portion of the service was powered by several music-related sites, Lala, Rhapsody, imeem and MySpace Music / iLike.

2009 is a long time ago when it comes to the web. Since then Lala has been acquired and shut down by Apple, imeem by MySpace. iLike was already part of MySpace Music at the time. Speaking of which, MySpace is on life support itself. This alone explains why the music search feature is gone from Google.

TechCrunch first noticed that music search wasn't working anymore, though there's no way to know for how long.

"The music search feature introduced in 2009 is currently unavailable while we make some updates to the user experience," Google told Search Engine Land.

While music has been removed from search, Google is working on a music locker and streaming service and even a digital music store. The closure of the music search feature may be coincidental, but it may very well be linked to that. If a music store is coming from Google, it would make much more sense to link to that and offer previews from it rather than from third-parties.