???? – 2008retired
AOL Hometown
“Every eight seconds, a new homepage. We never did learn HTML, and didn't need to.”
“Free, legal, and lovable - just never profitable. The hardest chorus to sing.”
Google Music Search was Google China's answer to a mainland music market drowning in piracy: over a million licensed songs, streamed or downloaded free, paid for by advertising shared with Orca Digital and the record labels. Built under Kai-Fu Lee as one of Google China's flagship localization projects, it took on unauthorized rivals like Baidu MP3 with a genuinely novel bargain - free music that actually paid the ar
Then the ground shifted: Kai-Fu Lee departed, Google shut down its mainland search service in 2010, and the service gradually faded into the margins. It closed in September 2012, undone by unprofitability and, by its own admission, impact that fell short of expectations. Top100.cn followed it out the door a year later, and China's experiment in free-and-legal music quietly left the stage.
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“Every eight seconds, a new homepage. We never did learn HTML, and didn't need to.”
“It played the losing side's movies beautifully, and never once complained about it.”
“It let you edit your friends' pages, and no social network has trusted us since.”