Want
to find your items quicker? Many people use very general
search words, get general results, then scroll through
numerous pages to find their items of interest. There is
a better way. The secret to effectively using our
powerful SearchTool lies in the selection of multiple
keywords - even three, four, five or more. With the
right approach you can find anything in a few clicks!
Screening Out Results
Suppose you want to find music by Mozart for piano that
includes an audio CD. Don’t enter Mozart and go on a
fishing expedition through 3,571 results. Just enter
Mozart piano cd and up come the 8 items that meet all
three criteria. The additional keywords can act as a
filter to screen out irrelevant results.
This works because the SearchTool’s default “Titles &
Names” method will not only search titles, but also the
series title, the format (book, CD, DVD, etc.), the
composer or author or arranger name, the publisher and
even the beginning part of the description. This makes
it easy to screen out irrelevant results, as in the
approach above. You see, unlike big search engines such
as google, where a very specific, six-keyword search
will actually drop many relevant results, our SearchTool
accurately reads our entire database. So for all choral
music arranged by Mac Huff, just enter choral huff.
For all Hal Leonard books for trumpet, just enter hal
leonard trumpet. For all violin books in the Suzuki
series, enter suzuki violin. It’s that easy.
You can also reverse this approach to broaden your
search. Suppose you located the piano book “Disney
Favorites – E-Z Play Today” and wondered about other EZ
play titles for piano. Simply enter E-Z Play Today
piano to locate all titles in the series. Or maybe
you want to broaden your search to include all Disney
books for easy piano, but not necessarily just within
the E-Z Play Today series. Enter disney easy piano
and you’ll see 51 titles. Enter disney piano and
237 items come up, all sorted top-down by popularity.
(Search is not case-sensitive so you don’t have to worry
about capitalization.)
Try any of these, or your own searches, in
this SearchTool
box to see how this works: |
|
Plurals
Our SearchTool performs what is called a “string
search.” This means that it looks within words to find a
match to your specified “string” of letters. So a search
for guitar will find both guitar and guitars. A
search for bari sax will find bari saxophone,
baritone sax and baritone saxophone.
Therefore it is often better to use the shorter, and
singular, versions of keywords. This is because a search
for “guitars” will NOT find “guitar”; a search for
“books” will not find “book.” Enter “Alicia Keys book”
for example, and you’ll see we have 2 items. But enter
“Alicia Keys books” and there are no results. (No items
have a format listed as “books,” only “book.”)
Song Search
One thing to keep in mind is that a Titles & Names
search does NOT search for song titles within the items.
So it will find a song title only if it also happens to
be the title of the item—for example when the item is a
single piece of sheet music. Then it’s title is the song
name. For song searches, click the drop-down menu on the
SearchTool and select “Songs & Names”.
Now you can enter keywords of a song’s title, or even
the entire title. Because many song titles have very
similar names, you may also want to add the composer or
artist last name along with the title to screen
irrelevant results. This can be tricky, however, because
sometimes the artist is not the composer. Although we
strive to include as many songs as possible, not ALL
songs in all products are listed here, and not ALL
composers and artists are listed with their songs.
Fortunately, most are.
Change the drop-down menu
to “Songs & Names” and try
a song search for your favorite
tune. |
|
Finding the Needle in the Haystack
Searching becomes more difficult when the keywords are
particularly common. Your items can become buried under
a huge volume of results. For example, a search for
bass method will bring up method books, CDs and DVDs
for bass guitar, upright string bass (including jazz and
orchestral styles) and double-bass drum methods.
In a case like this, put quotes around several words to
search only for occurrences of that phrase. In other
words, a search for bass guitar without quotes
will match occurrences of bass and of guitar separately.
But a search for “bass guitar” within quotes will match
only occurrences of bass guitar as a two-word phrase.
When All Else Fails!
If your searches are still coming up empty, don’t
despair. Change the drop-down menu to try a “Search All”
method. If that produces nothing, call us toll free at
(866) 419-6497. We may be able to coax out the right
results by knowing the product line and other possible
terms that may pull up more items.
***
Please give us your
feedback
on this initial newsletter! We also welcome any
suggestions as to what you would find most beneficial in
future issues.
Thank you,
Your friends at the The-Sheet-Music-Store / Music44.com
|
