Google shuts down free music search service in India

PanARMENIAN.Net - Google has shut down a specialized free music search service in India that it started in 2010 to link users to legal music streams on partners' sites, PCWorld reports.

The company said the closing of the service was part of its ongoing rationalization of its products to focus resources on high-impact ones.

"This is part of an ongoing effort across Google to bring greater focus to our portfolio of products," the company said in an emailed statement. The company has found that there are now many legal music options for users that feature in search, such as local Indian music sites and YouTube.

Google launched the music search google.co.in/music as a lab product that was experimental and not guaranteed to make it to Google.com. "We're rolling this out as a labs product and look forward to your feedback so we can improve the offering," it said in a blog post at the time.

Under the program, Google licensed metadata of songs owned or licensed by partners to make them searchable on the Internet. Once the user searched and found the music they wanted, the partners streamed the music directly from their websites to the user. Partners could additionally sell other services to the user through their websites.

Google said in April it was shutting down a number of products and services including Google Reader as part of a "spring cleaning" started in 2011.