AceOfSpuds: Technology, Life and Art ...blogged by Richard Berlin

Which haystack did I put that needle in?

The other night I was playing the bass (a statement that anyone who heard might debate, but no matter) when my wife, an accomplished violinist, offered a suggestion as she hurried through the room. I considered ignoring her, on the grounds that there might be a difference in technique between violin and bass, but since she gave me a dire warning about avoiding an(other) RSI, I thought I'd better check.

My beginner's books don't cover the subject of vibrato (much less the subject of "imitating a 'cello," which is what I needed to learn how to do) so I turned to my old friend Google. Now, I consider myself an expert Googler; I frequently find things within the first minute or two that previous searchers didn't. So I confidently typed in

       bass technique vibrato

Unsurprisingly--since "bass" is a word that the Google help page uses as an example of something that's going to need some narrowing down--that gave about 13000 hits. Up front were mostly pages about guitar or electric bass playing; how someone sounds on a recording; books or videos on how to play; etc. I tried adding the phrase 'how to' only to see at the top of the page

  "The following words are very common and were not included 
  in your search: how to [details]"

The [details] link explained that if I want to keep that phrase I have to put a "+" sign in front of it. It didn't work. I guess I should submit that as a bug report to Google, although I'm tempted to leave it as an exercise for their web crawler. :-)

I went into advanced search, started eliminating things, and eventually found a few links that were semi-useful. But it bugged me (still bugs me) that even with a search engine as powerful as Google, I had to work so hard for my information. With all of the information my fellow bloggers are adding on a daily basis, we are going to need to be able to sift it a lot more effectively than that!

I tried the search again on http://kartoo.com (an interesting experience if you've not tried it). My result was not great--I'm not an expert kartoo-grapher--but at least I wasn't overwhelmed.

If you've read this far, and you know a better way, I'm sure you're going to share it (because, to quote The Bard, "'tis charity to show"). But in researching this little note, I made a fascinating discovery: GOOGLE IS NOT COMMUTATIVE.

I typed in the terms in a different order,

    bass vibrato technique

and found a very useful link I'd never seen with the other search, on the very first page:

    http://www.uvm.edu/~mhopkins/string/?Page=bassvibratomov.html 

I didn't expect this, since they're theoretically just keywords, and the pages that are found are supposed to contain them all. (Well, actually, I didn't expect this because I hadn't read the Google help page in its entirety; although not prominently featured, it does say "Keep in mind that the order in which the terms are typed will affect the search results.")

So, it was news to me...and now that I know about it, I'm sure it will help me achieve new heights of Googling. Sadly, it is not going to help my bass playing, especially not by performance time next Friday. Life is so unfair.

Posted at 04:56PM Jun 10, 2004 by AceOfSpuds in General  |  Comments[2]