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Google adds song lyrics to Knowledge Graph search results

magic lyrics - Google Search 2014-12-22 11-30-32

Every once in a while, we get a new feature added to Google’s Knowledge Graph (the smart results that appear at the top of the search page). Today, Google has added the handy ability to see results for song lyrics right on the search page (via TechCrunch), meaning that websites focusing solely on providing lyrics and fighting for the top of Google’s results in this category might see a bit of a downturn in traffic…

But it doesn’t appear that Google is simply scraping the web’s lyrics sites for this content and reformatting it, as results don’t attribute the lyrics results to any one website. Instead, it looks like Google has put this content together itself, and even links users to the “Full Lyrics on Google Play” where they’ll—of course—find a quick link to purchase the song in question. To support this, it appears as if some songs that have lyrics widely available on various lyrics websites aren’t showing up in the Knowledge Graph.

This is what it looks like when you click through to Google Play:

Magic - Coldplay - Google Play Music 2014-12-22 11-42-07

This move comes following a change that came to Microsoft’s Bing search engine earlier this year, with one of the main differences being that Microsoft’s implementation does in fact source lyrics from a website, specifically LyricFind.com at the time of the service’s launch. It looks like Google wanted to make sure it could source their own repository of lyrics before officially adding the feature to its search results.

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Avatar for Stephen Hall Stephen Hall

Stephen is Growth Director at 9to5. If you want to get in touch, follow me on Twitter. Or, email at stephen (at) 9to5mac (dot) com, or an encrypted email at hallstephenj (at) protonmail (dot) com.