BY RICHARD JOHNSON

Observer senior reporter

johnsonr@jamaicaobserver.com

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

According to Laing, son of pioneer Jamaican model Althea Laing, Muigle was inspired by Google and works the same way.

When using Muigle, the search results display videos, streams and available mp3s for download. The engine has been in operation since last month with an index of 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.

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

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

“A few years ago, I experimented with a project called Muzack — a music App that combined a number of popular features used amongst Internet audiophiles. A groundbreaking 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,” he said.

Laing’s passion was reignited when he met 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 pop star Rihanna is the most popular artiste on Muigle. On the Jamaican side, that honour goes to singer Omi, who is riding high with Cheerleader, the number one song in the United Kingdom.