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Search like Google Part III: Advanced Search – The Best of Both Worlds?

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I’ve just updated the music4dance site with the remaining features for our search beta (see What if I just want to search for songs on music4dance like I do on Google? and Search like Google Part II: Autocomplete, Filter by Dance Style and Sorting for some background).  You should now be able to take advantage of both the new features like auto-complete and simple Google/Bing style searches with all of the dance specific features like filtering by tempo and dance style using the Advanced Search Beta.

Give both a try and let me know what you think.  I’ll leave both the beta and the legacy search capabilities up on the site for a bit so that you can compare and contrast.  Bug reports are welcome here.  And as always please submit any general feedback or suggestions here.

The Google Miniseries:

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: