TechCrunch's Robin Wauters noticed something strange about Google Music Search, a service that debuted with fanfare in October 2009: It no longer exists.
Google Music Search, MIASure enough, a Google search for Lady Gaga -- the requisite
artist for all new tech ventures related to music -- no longer serves up a box full of streaming songs. A special landing page for the service now redirects to a general list of search features, with no mention of Google Music Search.
What happened? Google hasn't said. In fact, this story could be quite old, given that the service vanished without a whisper. But over the last year and a half, the two main music services that powered Google Music Search, Lala and iLike, were acquired and subsequently killed by Apple and MySpace, respectively. R.J. Pittman, one of the main forces behind Google Music Search, now works for Apple. And a TechCrunch commenter who claims to have worked for iLike said adoption was minimal from the very beginning. With the driving forces out of the picture, I'm not surprised to see Google quietly put Music Search down.
Then again, I wouldn't be surprised to see Music Search's demise even if the driving forces were still in place. The amount of music available on YouTube -- official and otherwise -- makes a single-serve streaming service from Google redundant, especially when YouTube results get top priority in search results. And then there's the rumored Google Music, a store and digital locker that's supposedly near completion. If that's true, Google Music Search was approaching obsolescence anyway.
If you're still dying for streaming music to show up in search results, consider Yahoo and Bing. Both search engines have all the Gaga you could ever want.
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