Google adds new music search features to its regular web search and plans to open an online ebook store next summer.

Google’s economic success has been based on its pay-per-click text ads. You will find such ads accompanying search results, emails in Gmail and so on. Any company relying on only one revenue stream is vulnerable, though, which is one reason Google (NSDQ:GOOG) is trying to diversify.

Selling books and ebooks

Recently Google announced that it is going to launch an online ebook store, called Google Editions.

That makes perfect sense. Since Microsoft gave up on its book scanning program, Google is the only serious contender for the book search throne. A lot of people already use Google Book Search to find information about books: reviews, excerpts and in some cases, complete online copies of books.

Through agreements with book sellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble they already provide links to online shops that sell physical as well as digital books. What could be more natural that to sell books directly from Google’s sites, getting a larger piece of the pie?

Google Editions

Google Editions, to be launched next summer, will not be linked to one specific e-reader or platform. The files will be accessed on the web, and buyers can read the books on their e-readers by downloading a cached version of the file. As we understand it the search interface will be Google Books, which means that such search results also may appear in regular Web search results.

Google will both store such ebook files on its own servers “in the cloud” and add links to publisher web sites.

We are pretty confident that ebooks will do for publishing what MP3 did for music. This means that Google will in fact become the largest store front for books in the world. Amazon has reason to be worried.

Entering the music market

It does not end here, however. It now seems clear that Google also plans to get a bite out of the music market, in time maybe even challenging Apple’s iTunes. This week Google announced that they have improved the music search capabilities of their regular web search engine.

The Google Blog says:

“Now, when you enter a music-related query — like the name of a song, artist or album — your search results will include links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search partners MySpace (which just acquired iLike) or Lala. When you click the result you’ll be able to listen to an audio preview of the song directly from one of those partners.”

This service is somewhat similar to Yahoo’s: If you search for an artist name (but not song or album) on Yahoo, Yahoo will provide buttons and links that lets you listen to the full length track or buy the file (from Rhapsody).

At Google you may also enter fragments of song lyrics (if you cannot remember the title or the artist), and Google will try to find the song for you.

Google will now add links to several partnered sites, i.e. sites that lets you organize, listen to and download music online. Google will get percentages of the sales.

These are the sites included:

• Rhapsody (online music store)
• imeem (social music site)
• Pandora (internet radio - US only)
• lala (online music store)
• iLike (social music site)

This is not the same as having your own music store. You cannot buy music from Google directly — yet. But Google may still consider storing and selling its own music files at a later time.

Music files stored by Google?

In 2006 there were some rumors that Google would open an iTunes like music store. That never happened. At the time Google was focused on helping people find content delivered by other sites and services.

Since then Google’s philosophy has changed, and the company has become more open to the idea of selling products on their own. The Google Editions project proves this.

Moreover, the current practice of selling books through Google Books and music through Google Web Search, tells us that this is not so much about launching new sites, as including some additional links in traditional search results. The searchers will hardly notice that the seller is Google as opposed to Barnes & Noble or Rhapsody.

Whether Google will take the final step and start selling music on their own is unknown. Our guess is that they will, as they often do, bide their time and experiment with the current “link-to-other-sellers” model first.

photo credit: RossinaBossioB