mutatis mutandis [translation]

Sometimes, finding things on the web is easy. Last night I had trouble convincing A that her relatives were actually first cousins, once removed. She maintained that they were second cousins. This is a discussion I've found myself in far too often to count, so long ago I had investigated the exact terminology and committed it to memory. That wasn't enough to convince A, though, so I fired up the computer and on the first search we found the page which provided all the details we required.

Sometimes, though, finding things on the web is more challenging. After our success with discovering cousin definitions, A asked if it was possible to find the song that she had heard on the radio the other day. This got kinda complicated.

The first attempt was based on the fact that the song was probably titled "Sweater Song". This search showed us that there's a song out there by Weezer that's really pretty popular, and about sweaters. So then we tried again, this time removing Weezer from the equation. No luck here, either—the results not only didn't have the song we were looking for, but still had Weezer results due to many pages talking about the song without using "Weezer", or else using some altered version like "Weezerton".

By this point it'd gotten personal. This obscure little song thinks it can elude my mighty search prowess? We'll just see about that!

I went back to A for more details, like lyrics mentioned in the song, hoping that someone somewhere had recorded the lyrics on the web. She said that the song mentions that the sweater was left in a car after camping, so we added those keywords. Still no luck. "After" isn't a very good word to query on, though, so I took it out and replaced it with "lyrics". Google was getting us nowhere.

The lyrics search column on A9.com has some good results for a certain timespan of songs, so I took a stab at it, just searching for "sweater". No dice, though having only 33 results to wade through was nice.

I moved over to the Amazon.com music search, with which I am intimately familiar. If we can't find the lyrics directly, maybe we can find it based on the song title. Except, well, there are a LOT of songs that match just the keyword "sweater", and checking for "sweater song" just brings up that horrid Weezer again. I'm really starting to dislike Weezer, and not just because I once confused them with Ween, much to the entertainment of my friends.

All right, A, where did you hear the song? On NPR? Okay, let's check on the NPR website. Ah, you were listening to KQED? Let's look through the KQED archives, then.

Hey look, the archives only go back a couple weeks. You say you were listening to it a couple months ago? Super.

All right, back to Google, then. (Why not A9? I still haven't figured out how to make them my default search site in the Safari search field.) Since, according to A, the song was featured on the same NPR show as Baz Luhrmann's "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)", maybe someone mentioned that in their weblog, and we can search on it. Or maybe not. Too many results? Try another keyword. Still too many results, and none appear useful? Try going back to an earlier strategy of looking for lyrics, get briefly excited that it might be Liz Phair, but no, it's not. It's maybe from the 80's? Let's try that, then. Well, let's go back to the original query and build up from there again. If there are so many sites that mention Weezer's "Undone", let's try removing that keyword from the query. Hey, that looks promising, at the bottom of the first page, a post about Meryn Cadell that mentions a "Sweater Song" released in 1991 (well, not the 80's, but close).

One last search, including the artist's name in quotation marks, and we've found the lyrics to Meryn Cadell's "The Sweater".

Now if only there were some legal way of listening to at least a snippet of the song online. At least Meryn Cadell's website includes lyrics and shows which album the song is available on, and there are copies available for sale on Amazon.com.

After all that, no one was really that impressed. Ah well.

Last updated by eric Sun Oct 23 11:46 2005 | deed | link