Google Copies Bing, Adds Song Lyrics in Search Results

It’s not often we hear about Google search taking a page out of Microsoft’s Bing search engine playbook. That is what happened this week as a Google now displays lyrics at the top of the page instead of sites like AZLyrics or others.

We first reported that Bing displays full song lyrics back in October. The lyrics feature for Google seems to be first reported a few days ago and announced on this Google+ profile.

Bing vs Google Lyric Search

This afternoon I have been testing the two engines and compared their song lyric search capabilities and right now Bing is winning easily. Apparently the results for Google are powered by Google Play Music, so only the songs in its database show up.

When I search Bing for Stairway to heaven I get the lyrics in a nice box to the side, as well as direct results for the song, videos, and the band Led Zeppelin.

On Google, when I search Stairway to heaven I don’t get any lyrics…just results in Wikipedia and song lyrics at one of those sites that are littered with ads and popups.

However, if I search Stairway to heaven lyrics I get the lyrics results inline at the top of the page.

I have tested this with several popular songs, and while just entering the song title in Bing gives me lyrics, you need to include the artists name and/or “lyrics” or “song lyrics” to the search query. Which I guess isn’t toast big of a deal, since this feature is new, but it would be nice to have consistency.

Also, I find it annoying that when you do get song lyrics, they are listed as the first result. Bing does it much nicer by having the lyrics in a box off to the side and out of the way of other results you might be looking for.

To be fair though, when the lyrics feature first came to Bing, it displayed them at the top of the search results too. Hopefully Google will take that design page from Bing’s playbook too.

Speaking of music identification, if you have a Windows phone 8.1, you can have Cortana listen to music and tell you what the song is – and the feature is powered by Bing. It’s similar to Shazam, but without the need to install the extra app. This isn’t news, but a good reminder for users of Windows Phone.