Saying that Last.fm doesn’t have a clue in how to structure information retrieval in their own domain is the understatement of the century. I’ve become a pretty faithful user of the music service, but I have a hell of a time finding what I’m looking for with their search engine.
How bad is it? When I search for an artist (for example: Molly McGinn) I expect to get direct navigation to her artist page if there’s only one “Molly McGinn” in their artist database. Instead, I receive this result page:
Information Retrieval 101: Precision is better than recall. And if a system can’t be precise with a return, then it needs to be smart with how it displays relevant recall. In this case, since there are actually two “Molly McGinn” artist assets in their database, the recall should be limited to those two entries.
How did a query with the two terms, “molly” and “mcginn,” return artist results that don’t have both (not either) terms in their title? I tried searching both with and without quotes around the full name, but I get the same results.
It’s almost as if Last.fm reinvented the very premise of search for their own purposes, yet I can’t figure out what business or user objective they’ve supported.
Non-structured artist discovery during a precise search?
But that’s not the worst of it. Check out what the very same search query gets you in the soon to be live beta redesign:
Not only is there far too much recall, but the two most relevant returns don’t even bubble up to the top of the results page. “Molly McGinn” doesn’t appear until page 2, while “Molly McGinn and the Buster Dillys” don’t show up until… shit, I’m on page 6 of the results and it still hasn’t shown up.
The top results are now based on popularity. Who’s in charge over there? They’ve actually managed to make search far worse in this platform redesign.
Google To The Rescue
For all you frustrated Last.fm users, here’s a super simple way to work around their popularity-driven search results when you’re simply looking for a band page:
- Install Google Toolbar (link)
- When you’re on Last.fm, enter the band name, song name, shit, even your Last.fm friend’s profile name into the search field
- Don’t click on the “Search” label to the right of the field; be sure to click on the small arrow to the right of the label. Choose “Search Site” from the drop down list.
Following this method, my search for “molly mcginn” netted me these results:
It sucks that I have to step outside the domain to get solid domain results, but I have no other choice when trying to find specific pages. I’d love to close this post with a catchy one-liner to the extent of “and that’s why Google is worth so much” but this is best practice, standard approach stuff we’re dealing with here.
It’s kind of pitiful that Last.fm can’t get it right.
UPDATE: The beta site went live today and check out what I found:
Bravo, fellas.
I run across this alot at newspaper sites. Thank God for Google.
The information I got from Last.fm is that an artist has to have so many plays before they are searchable.
Well I found artists in their system that only had 4 plays using their search. And other artist that had thousands of plays returned no results.
i read the same thing in a forum thread, ty, and it made zero sense to me. once an artist has a profile page on last.fm — and is an explicit term in a database table — why would they need anything more to be found via search?
they’re now using google to provide search results in their forum area, so at least they’re open to suggestions.