Microtonal Web Searching

A piece of 'web searching' advice and a list to jumpstart your own
searches ...

My day job in advanced development with the world's largest
business-to-business information database provider, Dun & Bradstreet,
keeps me in close touch with the major players in the Internet
infrastructure, including developers of search engines and electronic
directories.

My personal impression is that yes, indeed, many web designers --
particularly students or amateurs -- do not organize their information
to make it searchable and add really awful background shades and colors.
This piece of design advice from Brian Mclaren is good and cannot be
repeated too often. Hooked to a high speed network this stuff is awful
-- at home, it's intolerable.

However, I strongly emphasize that until the Internet becomes searchable
through author-provided keyword indices that are systematically defined
and gathered, which is many years away, most searches to be meaningful
must be combinations of important keywords and require some creative
searching.

I would suggest Digital's AltaVista. You can get there either through
http://www.altavista.digital.com
or get the "text only, advanced query" (my favorite -- death to
unnecessary graphics!) at
http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=aq&text=yes

Choose your keywords carefully. For example, the word "microtonality"
rarely shows up in that exact form in the TUNING list and cannot be a
good predictor of web page content left on its own. When I select the
phrase
microtonal near music and tuning
I receive 95 hits with a reasonable "goodness" density. Yes, many of
the hits are themselves pointers to other sites (Mills college and the
South East Just Intonation center get frequent mention) and yes, the
search engines should do a better job on the final bit of formatting,
cleansing, and de-duplicating. The phrase
"Just Intonation" and music
gets 198 hits, a bit of a struggle but still manageable.

Finally, without filling up too much space, I'd recommend the
http://www.justonic.com
site for a good summary of just intonation and microtonal music, and
their list of "other Just Intonation" sites. The JI Network is linked
from here. My biggest complaint about the Justonic site is lack of
prices and ordering information -- whatever it is they're selling sure
sounds good. But that is another post for another time. Anybody used
their products yet?

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