Earlier this week Google announced  it’s partnership with a number of online music sources such as Myspace and Lala to provide searchers with new music search results that include music samplings.  However, it appears that this exciting new feature came at a cost.

Avid music searchers like me may recall that oftentimes when you would search for an artist you would get the Google Music result for the artist.  The result would provide you with info on the artist, related artist links and discography.  If that weren’t enough you had the ability to view individual albums and their tracklists, and get links to sites where you could purchase the music.  What was even more impressive was that Google actually had a relatively unknown music search operator that could be used to obtain this information immediately for your query.  For instance if you typed music:nine inch nails in the Google search bar you would be directed to the Google music page for Nine Inch Nails.  If you run that query now you are simply redirected to the Google Music Search page.

I used the music operator and the Google Music service quite frequently when it came to updating my MP3 data or seeking out new albums and imports to add to my music collection.  However it doesn’t look like Google is going to be an option any longer when it comes to this sort of data.  From what I can tell this data has been completely stripped from Google and if it hasn’t I have no idea where they have hidden it.

It seems to me that this sort of update from Google would have benefited from not only integrating the new features, but expanding upon the existing features.  Provide artist, album, and track data while providing samplings from various partners as well.  Why provide less data in exchange for some music samplings?

Overall I think this is a positive move from Google. I had always wished Google provided music samples with it’s previous music search services, so in that aspect this is a step in the right direction.  I only hope that with the slew of new music partners they can perhaps incorporate some additional data like that which was provided previously.  Hell, they could even kick it up another notch and partner with some lyric sites.  That would be music search gold.

Love him or hate him, Michael Jackson was a pop culture icon. Surrounded in mystery, money, and misunderstanding the pop singer who died mysteriously on June 25th of this year, is now being honored by the folks at Google to commemorate the singers birthday. Google users are already being greeted with the following Google logo to commemorate what would have been the singer’s 51st birthday on August 29th.

Sadly both the singers birthday and the logo come just one day after the coroner released the findings on Michael Jackson’s death, which has been ruled a homicide.

So for the last couple of days I’ve had to do some Google Local listings for clients and I noticed that Google has perhaps reverted back to it’s old phone verification process.  For some time now you were given the option to have Google call you immediately or in 5 minutes.  However, upon clicking finish when adding or updating a list and selecting phone verificationI have since been receiving the following screen:

Seems that Google has gotten a bit impatient with the whole phone verification process, which sucks for those of us who need to follow up with the client first.  The good news is that you can still go back in and request the call again later, but I’m pretty sure one of my clients has gotten two random calls in the last couple of days wondering why the hell they are getting an automated PIN via phone.  Shame, shame Google!

UPDATE: Upon doing some more work with the listings it now appears that Google has changed the phone verification process completely.  In the past you would get a PIN and enter it when they called you.  Now, instead, they call you with the PIN and you have to input it online.  Talk about a pain when it comes to setting these up for clients!