The word Google has become a generic term for on-line searches engines, and if Jamaican software developer Lloyd Laing has his way, his on-line tool Muigle, could become “music’s most powerful search engine”.

According to Laing, who happens to be the son of pioneering Jamaican model Althea Laing, Muigle was inspired by Google and it works the same way. When using Muigle, the search results displays videos, streams and available mp3s for download.

The engine has been in operation since last month has indexed over 15 million tracks.

“Well we’ve been indexing tracks since December 2014, and with a little help from the Jamaica Data Mining Project Array, we were able to index 13 million tracks by February this year. We went live in beta on April 28. We don’t host content, we’ve just found a novel way of bringing it all together from legal, publicly accessible sources,” he explained.

“Well we hit our 1 millionth search request on May 18. On that day we had accumulated 98,016 visits. We’re seeing a weekly growth rate of 24% weekly, and should be doing a million visits by the end of the third quarter 2015. Our return visitor rate is 70%,” he added.

Laing has dabbled in matters related to technology and entertainment previously but became derailed to the high financial cost and the cultural roadblocks which exist locally.

“A few years ago I experimented with a project called Muzack — am music App that combined a number of popular features used amongst internet audiophiles. A ground breaking idea, the artistes loved it but it could not gain traction because key local producers at the time were hesitant to embrace the idea, so content was limited, and as such the project fizzled.”

Has passion was re-ignited when he met up with a group of like-minded individuals and Muigle was born

“Our Long term goal is to become the first digital listing on the Jamaica Junior Stock Exchange. We have identified realised revenue streams, and by products that have the potential to make future investors happy,” a confident Laing stated.

He indicated that Barbadian-born, international pop star Rihanna is the most popular artiste searched for on Muigle. One the Jamaican side the honour goes to singer Omi, who has recently hit international charts, including striking gold in the UK with his remixed version of his breakout hit Cheerleader.