Is Google's Version Of iTunes... iTunes?

from the maybe-maybe dept

A few months ago there were rumors floating around that Google was getting ready to launch their own version of iTunes. Eventually, what came out was an unnecessarily useless media player based on VLC, but limited to just Google media files. If that was their version of iTunes, it still needed a lot of work. It didn't exactly set the world on fire. So maybe the rumors were actually about something entirely different. The latest rumor, submitted by John and many, many others, is that Google is actually getting ready to announce a deal with Apple allowing some sort of access to iTunes via the Google interface. Details (and anything that would seem to confirm the story or even indicate the source of the rumors) are scarce, so the whole thing seems sort of vague. However, given Google's stated goal of helping people find anything, and their desire to better search the "deep web," it wouldn't be hard to see how a Google search on a particular musician would then point people to that musician's recordings on iTunes. If that's the case, it would certainly get a lot of attention, but might make some people wonder "why only iTunes?" Either way, it would also probably upset some folks at Yahoo -- who fancy themselves as more of a media company than Google, and who has always wanted to link searchers immediately to a "buy" opportunity when they searched on something like a musician.