Tag Archives: Beta

Searching for Music

Search like Google Part II: Autocomplete, Filter by Dance Style and Sorting

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I am continuing to rebuild the music4dance database capabilities in the more intuitive style of current search engines like Google and Bing – the initial attempt at this is documented in this post.

Auto-Complete

Auto-complete is something everyone expects when searching these days.  So if you were to type “Peab” into the search box on the simple search page you should see suggestions like the following pop-up:

  • Peabody
  • Peabo Bryson
  • Tonight, I Celebrate My Love (feat. Peabo Bryson)
  • Peabo Bryson & Regina Belle
  • Peabo Bryson And Roberta Flack
  • Love and Rapture: The Best of Peabo Bryson

And just like Bing or Google, clicking on the selection will take you to a list of songs that contain the selected text.

The thing that is a little different for music4dance than a generic search is that one might want to do combinations of things like a fragment of a title and a dance style name.  I haven’t figured out an easy way to do that, but as always I’m open to suggestions.

Filter by Dance Style

But I can fall back to the original way that I landed on for just searching within a single dance style.  So now on the Simple Search page, you can select a dance style from the drop down to the left of the search box and we’ll just show you results for that dance style.  So if you select Cha Cha and then type “tea” into the search box you should get only songs that have the word tea somewhere in the description that have also been tagged as Cha Cha.

Sorting

And finally, I’ve implemented sorting by Title, Artist, Tempo, Beat, Energy, Mood and Recency.  Just click on the appropriate heading in the Simple Search Page, just like you did in the classic search page.  I’m still looking for a reasonable way to sort by votes on dance style.

The Google Miniseries:

Searching for Music

What if I just want to search for songs on music4dance like I do on Google?

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One of the things that I’ve had a lot of fun with is building a sophisticated search engine where I (and you) can do things like find songs that someone has tagged as Waltz and someone else has tagged as Foxtrot.  Or find all swing songs that are in a particular tempo range.  There are lots of neat things that you can do with the Advanced Search system if you’ve got some knowledge of dance and music and want to dig deep into these corners of the music4dance catalog.

But what if you just want to search through the catalog the same way you would on Google or Bing?   For instance, what if you’re looking for a song that has been tagged as Wedding and has the words “Love” and “Time” in it?  With simple search you can just type Wedding Love Time into the search box and you’ll get some useful results.  You can further refine the search by using some of the standard search modifiers like + and – and putting quotes (“) around phrases to be more precise about your searches (for instance try “First Dance” +Foxtrot +Rock).  But if you’re the type that doesn’t bother with that on Google you should be fine not worrying about it here as well.

More information is available on the help page but you should be able to go to Simple Search from the “Music” menu on the music4dance home page and dive right in.

The Google Miniseries: