Options and hints on the search facility

The "New and Exciting"tm lyric search page uses HTML forms to gather information about the search to be performed. Therefore it has many more facilities than the previous CGI-index version. In particular, the old version used the unix AWK utility to do the searching and formatting, operating directly on the HTML files. The new version uses hand-grafted C working on unformatted files. It's not as good as a precomputed index, but it's better than it was.

Authors

You can now speed your search up by restricting the search to songs written by a particular author. Some songs, of course, are co-written and searching for each of the authors will still find the song. Where songs are credited to all four of the band, I have also included my theory for who really wrote the song. So a search for Roger will find Breakthru, Ride The Wild Wind etc.

You can also just search songs released as a single. This includes songs released anywhere in the world, not just the UK. If you do this then setting the "UK chart position" sort order is sensible.

Find whole words only

If you search for "here we are" then you will find this phrase in "Princes Of The Universe" and "Sister Blue", but you will also find "this is where we are today" in "My Life Has Been Saved". This option stops that happening.

In other words, a search for "the" will also find "then", "these", "there", "their", "them", "other","gather" etc etc unless this option is selected.

Find songs that don't mention the phrase

This simply inverts the search and gives you a list of all the songs except the ones that contain the search words. This is not really interesting unless you are searching for a common word and many would say it isn't even that interesting then! But search for "the", set this option and choose "number of words/descending" as the sort order for a quick list of all the non-instrumentals that don't include "the" in them. You never know when it might come up in a quiz!

Search

You can leave the text box blank to generate lists of all songs/all by an author/all singles/all singles by an author sorted into any order.

Sorting

What can I say? You can sort the results:

Alphabetical order just uses the song name.
Date order uses the album release date, unless you're just listing or searching singles when it uses the date of release of the single (typically the UK release date)
Number of hits order counts how many times the word or words occurred in the song, and so does nothing if you are doing a "does not occur" search or generating a list. This sort order looks best in descending order
Chart position is UK chart position, though songs released elsewhere are sorted ahead of songs released nowhere
Song length uses the number of words in the song as an approximation.
Song duration uses the length of the song as taken from the CD (edited singles and things are ignored)

Secondary sorts are done in alphabetical order, except when alphabetical is the primary sort as well when date is the secondary field. All primary sort orders can be reversed if you really want to.

Problems

Click here for a list of common problems and advice on how to get round them.

Searching HTML

The old search facility operated directly on the HTML files. This can actually be useful as it allows you to search for information in the comments that I put at the top and bottom of each song. For example, search for "Mike Stone" will find all the songs where I mention him. This might be useful for answering quizzes or something. Therefore, the old version has not been deleted.