Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

Google Music: Either stupid or “not evil”

Posted in Google, Music, Search by Elliott Back on December 20th, 2005.

Google just added music results to their search engine: type a popular artist’s name and you get a little music strip, much like their stock prices widget:

Steve Vai:  Google Music 01

If you click on more music results, it takes you to an artist detail page with songs and albums:

Steve Vai: Google Music 02

Clicking on an album takes to another detail page, unfortunately forgetting your original search query in the top bar. This is a fairly major interface bug, so it’s puzzling that it’s there:

Steve Vai:  Google Music 03

However, the moment of perfect stupidity or don’t be evil brilliance comes when you realize that their buy this album at iTunes, Amazon, or somewhere else links don’t have referral IDs and don’t generate revenue for them.

You might also wonder why you can’t search for lyrics or a song title. The blog entry Google uses as a press-release substitute explains that they can’t do it because of namespace conflicts. Personally, I just think they’re lazy. A snippet from a song is more strongly correlated with that song’s lyrics than the rest of the web.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2005 at 4:55 pm and is tagged with referral ids, search engine type, music results, little music, google, amazon, stock prices, widget, snippet, search query, brilliance, namespace, itunes, blog entry, stupidity, conflicts, press release, lyrics, interface. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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