Google does music - and funny URLs

fun music

From the don't be evil yet still take over the world department, the new Google musicsearch attempts to organize our musical world. The official announcement is on the Google Blog.

And it does well, as usual. It knows about Robben Ford (not too hard), Thierry Lang (bit harder, but he has a few albums out on Blue Note), Marcel Papaux (a way cool drummer from around here), but not (yet) about Dominique Scheder or le Bel Hubert. Still quite impressive though!

URLs are rather opaque, which is unusual for Google: searching for all versions of Stevie Wonder's "Sir Duke" song, I get this URL: http://www.google.com/musicsearch?id=kNgjdCZLu0H. At first I thought it was linked to a session or cookie, but it works as well from another host in another country. Does it work for you? It looks like the ID must point to some server-side data, I'd be curious to find out how long it is valid.

By the way, Google finds 32 versions where ITunes only shows 14. These guys rock.