Google's Chinese music search engine has been shut down

Sep 21, 2012 09:04 GMT  ·  By

Google Music's only been around for a year or so. It's not the most popular Google product, but the company is determined to have a go at it, it needs a solid set to entertainment services and products to compete with Apple and Amazon.

But there's an even older, much older in fact, and even less well-known Google Music, one that is now getting shut down. The reason you haven't heard of it is because it's China-only.

Google's Chinese music site is nothing like the Google Music it offers in the US though, it was part of the search engine and was designed both as a way to discover music and to get it, legally.

But Google doesn't seem that satisfied with the results, Google has been scaling back its Chinese efforts, and has shut it down.

"We decided to turn off the music search service in China, turning their focus towards the more influential," Google wrote on its China Blog.

"In March 2009, we released the Google music search cooperation with Whale Music (Top100.cn), to provide Chinese users with free and legal high quality music. However, the influence of this product is not as high as we expect, so we decided to resources to other products," it said.

Google says the people working on the project have already been moved to other projects inside Google China. Users of the music search service have until October 19 to get their playlists out before the page is completely removed.

The move has plenty to do with Google's decision to pull the search engine out of China, two years ago. It offered a solution to those that still wanted to use Google, go to the Hong Kong site, but it wasn't popular traffic dropped. With that, services built into the search engine, like the music site, withered as well.