Online business Toolkit

Google launches music search

Elinor Mills CNET News

Published: 16 Dec 2005 11:15 GMT

Google on Thursday launched a new service intended to give searchers fast links to song lyrics, musical artists and CD titles on the main search results page.

Google Music allows a person to type in the name of a band, artist, album or song in the main Google search bar special, and results will appear at the top, accompanied by icons of music notes, said Marissa Mayer, vice-president of search products and user experience at Google.

Items that can be purchased will have links to merchants for online ordering or downloading, she said. Initial merchant partners include Apple's iTunes service, RealNetworks Rhapsody, eMusic and Amazon.com.

"We aren't building out a music store," Mayer said. "We are getting people to the iTunes store" and others.

Results will also include links to supplemental Google Web pages with more information about the music, including names of tracks on a CD and other CDs a band or artist has released. Google also will provide snippets of reviews from sites on the Web and links to those sites.

"This has been one of the longstanding unfilled user needs," Mayer said. "We saw a search need where we weren't providing users with the highest-quality results that we could."