| So where are we to find the results of your searchbot search? Is that a great straight line or what? Anyway some people have found this useful:
http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/findtune.html If you want to see the actual search results, rather than just look for a tune, there's a link to the index files on the page. These are from the previous search, a few weeks ago. I usually don't update the index files until a search run has finished, unless someone makes a special request to get their tunes into the indexes. So the current search's results won't be available for a couple days. This has been an interesting project to work on. Of course, it's just one of a whole flock of specialized searches that people are developing. By now, we have lots of experience with the keyword-oriented search sites. We all know how useful they are. But their tendency to turn up unrelated things that use similar words has become one more source of humor in society at large. So people are trying to find ways to do a better job. One approach is specialized searches by software that has some understanding of a specific subject. That's what my site is all about. One thing that was unfortunate was that "abc" was chosen as the name of this notation. Type that into any search site, and you'll see why it wasn't a very good name. "abc music" isn't much better, due to one large corporation. And you'll also see a lot of results on "the ABC's of ...." Actually, I have had some success with using google. I have a little perl script that asks google about "abc tunes notation", extracts the URLs, and tries them as starting points. Among the 600 or so distinct URLs in the first 1000 results, there were about 60 that actually had abc tunes. A 10% success rate is pretty decent for a keyword match on a common term like "abc". So I'm not criticising google; I'm just one of the gang who sees their good and bad points. This 10% rate can be greatly improved by using a program that knows how to follow hyperlinks and can extract abc tunes from the files. The original motive for all this, of course, was so that I could find tunes when I wanted them. It was obvious 5 or 6 years ago that people were putting their tunes online. But asking in a mailing list is a slow way to find something. I got to thinking "Hey, you're a programmer; you shouldn't be doing that by hand. It's a computer's job." Then I told a few people about it. I've gotten quite a lot of feedback since then. And, of course, at every opportunity, I tell people that my tune search site is only as useful as the body of abc music that's on the web. There's a lot of good stuff out there, but there's much more that's missing. So when people ask about something that can't be found, I usually suggest that they should do the transcription and put it online. And send me the URL. (Maybe I should add a URL entry form to my search pages.) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
