Important Suggestions For Cross-searching

System glitches are preventing the ‘search this blog’ function from being fully operational. In fact, as of October, 2011, some of the content of posts published after September 1st, 2011 is invisible to these internal searches. Blogger team was contacted and they are trying to solve the issue but this does not look likely to happen any time soon. Here is a recap of what you can do should you want to cross-search a specific term (artist, album title. etc.) within the posts of this blog.

1) Labels

Space for labels will contain only 200 characters per post. Although this impediment can actually be overcome, the system won't accept more than 20 labels per post in any case. This makes the usage of labels not suitable for thorough cross-searches. What you will find posted as labels for any given post will only be:

1) The names of the titular artist the post is about.
2) Lee.
3) All those other musicians that are titular artists as well in already published posts. This will not necessarily mean the artists in question will have played on the same track(s) as Lee.
4) Drummers (no percussionists).

This means that, should you want to find all the posts a specific labelled name was included in within this blog, you just have to click on the relative label at the bottom of any given post.

In order to be able to post the drummers labels I had to get rid of a couple of labels in the James Taylor post, namely Art Garfunkel's, Bonnie Raitt's and Byron Berline's. I hope Blogger will revise its label policy so as to permit a re-integration, obviously not just for these three instances but as a general step forward to better cross-searching of data.

2) ‘Search This Blog’ function

Please use the ‘search this blog’ box on the right column of blog if you are looking for names that fall outside the above labeling criteria (i.e. any musician/producer/technician who might have played a role in a project that did not bear their name). This would be the best way to search for whatever word within the overall posted content. Alas, above-mentioned glitches are preventing this search system to be fully functional: as of September, 2011, some of the content of posts published after July 11th, 2011 is invisible to these internal searches. Blogger team was contacted and they are trying to solve the issue but this does not look likely to happen any time soon.

3) External Google search

The above-mentioned ‘search this blog’ box will help you if you want to know in how many of these posts a certain name or title appears (let’s say “Carole King”, or “Thoroughbred”). Since this function does not seem to work properly, the best way round this problem is to position yourself on an empty Google search page external of this blog and search both the name of the blog and of the artist/title you look for together, putting the latter in between double quotes. For instance, to look for all of the Bass Routes entries that include both Leland Sklar and Carole King you should type:

site:bassroutes.blogspot.com “Carole King”

When Google shows you the results, go to last page, click on the ‘repeat the search with the omitted results included’ at the bottom of the results list and you can now start to sift through the many ensuing results. Tipically, you will get the ‘real’ stuff first and then a series of spurious results which will appear only because the term you have been looking for was mentioned in comments and/or notes, or in monthly summaries, etc.

All of this is very tricky so we hope whatever glitch is causing this mishap to be dealt with soon by the staff at Google. They are working on it…

Thanks!

L.R.



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