Google closes music-search service in China

Google Inc has closed its music-search service in China, the world's largest Internet market where the search engine's share keeps declining.

Google launched the service in 2009 in partnership with Top100.cn, a copyrighted-music website that has basketball star Yao Ming as one of the investors. The service was meant to fend off competition from Chinese rival Baidu Inc, which at the time provided users with links to copyright-infringing music websites.

"The influence of this product was not as high as we expected, so we decided to shift our resources to other products," Yang Wenluo, Google China's engineering research general manager, wrote on Google China's blog.

Employees related to the product will move to other teams, he added.

China had at the end of June 538 million Internet users, the most in the world. However, Google's market share in the market has continued to drop after it moved its servers and redirected mainland traffic to Hong Kong in 2010.

In revenues, Baidu had 78.6 percent of the search market in China in the second quarter, while Google had 15.7 percent, according to domestic research company Analysys International.

Market share of the US search engine reached its peak in China at 35.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009.