Google said it will close a music download service in China in October this year which said to be losing its ground in the country.
The Google Music Search service was launched in March 2009 in partnership with the copyrighted-music website Top100.cn.
The service was available only to computers with an Internet address in China and was lauched to compete with Google’s rival Baidu.
Google senior engineering director Boon-lock Yeo said: "The influence of this product turned out to be lower than we expected, and as a result we decided to transfer our resources to other products instead."
The decision to stop the music search service comes after Google’s decision to close its China web search service in 2010 after refusing to follow Chinese government censorship rules.
Google’s products that include Maps, search and Gmail, sometimes face accessibility issues in China.
In June this year, Google launched a feature that would alert Chinese users searching on its Hong Kong site of words that were blocked.
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In March 2010, Google had stopped censoring search results in China – fulfilling a threat the firm made following a cyber attack on its services.
Google had 15.7% of China’s search market in the second quarter of the year, while Baidu had 78.6%, according to Beijing based research firm Analysys International.
