Search engine giant Google has shut down its free music search service in India. The service was started by Google in 2010 and it linked users to legal music streams on sites of the partners.
The company released a statement which said, “This is part of an ongoing effort across Google to bring greater focus to our portfolio of products”. Google also found that there are many legal music options for users which feature in search, like local Indian music sites and YouTube.
The music search google.co.in/music was launched by Google as a lab product, which was supposed to be experimental and did not guarantee to make it to Google.com. The search engine giant in a blog said, “We’re rolling this out as a labs product and look forward to your feedback so we can improve the offering”.
Under the program Google licensed metadata of songs which were owned by partners in order to make them searchable on the internet. After users searched and found the music they wanted, the partners streamed the music straight from their websites to users. Additionally, partners could sell other services to users through their websites. In April 2013, Google said that it was shutting down several products, including Google Reader.
Photo Credits: WSJ
