Standard search techniques work (ex put the query in quotes for exact match). Also the text under the logo is editable by anyone, so you see the most recent change.
Most of the traffic to lyric sites originate from long-tail search keywords (414 million global broad match monthly searches for lyrics). Your site has no Googlebot crawlable data, barring you from participating in a share of the long-tail search volume.
That's okay, for now this just exists as a solution to the problem that no lyric sites exist which are not aggressively bad. Though, we might contend that a large amount of traffic comes from the long-tail search because there is no site worth going to - ie it doesn't matter which lyric site I use, so I might as well just google it.
I really like the site. One feature I would like to see implemented would be comments on each individual song. That's one of the main reasons I look up the lyrics, too see what the song means to other people.
I like your site a lot, but am wondering when you get hit for being various kinds of scrapers.
I wish you well, I am so glad to find that others hate lyrics sites as much as I do. And yet, I am often searching for lyrics (when I don't have Soundhound near me.)
I am able to use Google's Personal Blocklist to block out the worst of the worst sites. That leaves me with a pretty good solution.
Thanks for mentioning Lystener! I think it's because lyric sites aren't sticky. You're there for a song, and you're gone again. Lystener switches that around, kind of, but you still need the initial urge to look up a song lyric.
When I go to the site (Firefox & Chrome on Linux), I can't enter any search. I see the logo, with the text 'Song Rabbit' below, and when I click on the text it disappears. But I don't see any text input fields.
You should integrate more sites (assuming that's how this works). A query that I expect to work is "Simeon's Dilemma", which currently returns no results.
Nice! Sadly, the first lyric I thought to try ("song that doesn't end") didn't work. :)
The links at the upper right are so faint they almost disappear; a bit more contrast, please.
How do you plan to deal with the copyright issues that will inevitably get thrown at you? Your "legal" link says you don't store any copyrighted material, but I don't see any evidence that you load it from elsewhere, and in any case that hasn't protected the numerous "link sites" out there. I personally think you've done something awesome and reasonable here, but you will get hit by this at some point.
You might consider using real query URLs such as /?q=query or /q/query , and using the HTML5 history API to load those query URLs via javascript without changing the page. That gives you unique URLs without just using anchors, making it feasible to index.
I would encourage you to consider sending people to a completely new URL instead of loading the lyrics with Ajax, unless the browser supports the HTML5 History API.
That way, people who use modern browsers get the original user experience, but those who use legacy browsers have to see a quick refresh. Your site is so clean already that I doubt most IE users would notice the load time.
As an alternative, support hashes and the history API so most people see the "clean" URLs.
How do you think this will be sustainable? I remember a good reddit or HN thread asking why lyric websites seemed to be particularly ad-laden. The consensus was that due to the nature of the visitors, it was the only viable revenue stream. Users to these kind of sites really only visit for a short period and leave after they've found what they came for. Having said that, I have no suggestion on what would work.
According to the legal, you are not storing the lyrics. If that is the case, where are you sourcing them from? Can you give a little background on how the site works, what it runs on and other interesting details?
I was thinking that as well, but if they are not storing the data, that would mean a real time scrape? Seems a little troublesome. All it would take for the site they are scraping from to break the entire site is a single character change probably, then their regex fails.
The search responses fail to find a lot of pretty standard songs (girls want to be with the girls fails to return the talking heads song, helicopter fails to return the xtc song, books about ufos fails to return the husker du song, ...). And september gurls returns the bangles cover ...
Also, other languages than english are pretty much non-existant.
The only ones I had any success with was "Ne me quitte pas" and "la vie en rose." Other Brel and Piaf songs didn't show up. Neither did any Serge Gainsbourg.
That link is dynamic based on your current session, so it may work for you, but if someone hasn't searched for anything then they wont see anything on your link.
I love what you're trying to do, but how will you monetize this? Will you pursue amazon based referrals for songs? (I'm guessing it won't add up unless you have scale) Or will you try to launch a "premium" service?
I like the publicly editable tagline, it seems like a fun idea. There was something about sexual relations with bunnies however when I visited the site. Maybe a keyword filter would help?
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadThank you so much for this. Is there a search API?
https://developer.musixmatch.com/documentation
I wish you well, I am so glad to find that others hate lyrics sites as much as I do. And yet, I am often searching for lyrics (when I don't have Soundhound near me.)
I am able to use Google's Personal Blocklist to block out the worst of the worst sites. That leaves me with a pretty good solution.
There must be a reason why these clean lyrics sites aren't more prominent.
As does http://rapgenius.com for hip hop
I built my own at http://new.songvoodoo.com as well, so other sites do exist
That, and I do a terrible job of promoting it.
Similar to your site in terms of "not storing, just search engine". I've put the javascript snippet for it at the bottom of the page source.
The links at the upper right are so faint they almost disappear; a bit more contrast, please.
How do you plan to deal with the copyright issues that will inevitably get thrown at you? Your "legal" link says you don't store any copyrighted material, but I don't see any evidence that you load it from elsewhere, and in any case that hasn't protected the numerous "link sites" out there. I personally think you've done something awesome and reasonable here, but you will get hit by this at some point.
How do you plan to get revenue, if there are no ads?
That way, people who use modern browsers get the original user experience, but those who use legacy browsers have to see a quick refresh. Your site is so clean already that I doubt most IE users would notice the load time.
As an alternative, support hashes and the history API so most people see the "clean" URLs.
Another problem is that the back button is broken.
(I really should have posted this as reply to when you mention there are no spam free lyric search engines)
1) Please show the first few lines of the song under each result
2) Please stack the results like traditional <li>s - the "cloud" effect makes them very hard to scan.
>>an innovative seach interface
The search responses fail to find a lot of pretty standard songs (girls want to be with the girls fails to return the talking heads song, helicopter fails to return the xtc song, books about ufos fails to return the husker du song, ...). And september gurls returns the bangles cover ...
The only ones I had any success with was "Ne me quitte pas" and "la vie en rose." Other Brel and Piaf songs didn't show up. Neither did any Serge Gainsbourg.
Users would generally tend to search for a song's first line or most frequently repeated phrase. Search results could be ordered based on that.