Help for Tab Robot Search Engine

Introduction: Tab Robot accesses the largest number of Guitar and Bass Tabs on the Web using a search engine designed for Tab retrieval. It increases by several times the number of Tab files in the well-known, but now inactive. On Line Guitar Archive (OLGA). In fact, this search engine, in effect, turns the entire Web into a single On Line Guitar Archive.

Background: This search tool is designed specifically  for finding and organizing Guitar Tabs and Chords on the Web. It was built starting from the most widely-used MIDI search robot on the Web,  MIDI Explorer. Tab files are harder to detect than MIDIs because they may be simple HTML or TXT files. In finding Tabs, Tab Robot relies on specially-designed Tab/Chord detectors.

Search Modes:
(1) Song - all matching Tabs are grouped together by their name (file and link names). This is usually the best way to find specific Tabs.
(2) Song (sort by site) - Tabs are arranged according to the page that they are referenced from. Use this to find the different sites having the song that you specify. Don't worry about picking the right mode - you can switch between (1) and (2) when examining results.
(3) Artist/Group - Tabs of songs of nearly four thousand artists are identified. Search by first or last name - it doesn't matter. Common misspellings are also accounted for. Results are organized by song name.
(4) Artist/Group (sorted by site)- Like above, but with Tabs arranged by site - use this to find the different sites with Tabs for your requested group. Switch between modes (3) and (4) later from the results page if you wish.

Search Logic: A specially designed dictionary-like search is used for finding Tabs by song or artist. This finds all Tabs/artists that match the letters that you type, regardless of punctuation or whether the matching term is longer. For instance, Tab searching for "happy birthday" finds not only all "happy birthday" Tabs, but also songs that begin with these words ("happy birthday-elvis", for example). "Red hot" in the artist search will get you the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Entering "ab" will get you all artists whose name begins with the letters "ab". Punctuation is ignored, too - ACDC, AC-DC and AC_DC with all find AC/DC.

Results: The engine provides a link to the page that connects to the Tab of interest. Numbers of matching Tabs are shown and, when there is enough space, the Tab (link) name, file name and number of Tab and Chord lines detected in each file are also shown. If an artist or other relevant information is found it is also shown.
Hints

Too Many or Too Few Tabs: To locate all possible matching files, use the SMALLEST NUMBER of letters necessary. If you find too few matches, try again with more letters. If, on the other hand,  you get too few matches, you may want to try searching  with fewer letters. Used correctly, by entering just enough letters to identify your song you can find tunes incapable of being retrieved by word-based search methods.

Artists: Searching by artist is like searching by Tab name - don't bother spelling the whole name, you will be able to select the exact artist from choices unless your entry exactly matches a single group. If we think we are missing someone, let us know by e-mail and we'll include it in our next update.

Contents

How Many?: So how many files do we have? Not including OLGA (http://www.olga.net) we access over 150,000 Tabs/Chords with different names for a total of 259,413 files referenced on 28,292 web pages. 

OLGA: Four separate active OLGA sites are blended into these results (about 32,000 songs are in the original OLGA). Actually one of the OLGA sites is greatly enhanced ( http://www.renegadeolga.com/ ), one has an abbreviated version ( ftp://ftp.uu.net/doc/music/ ) and two others were pretty close to the original ( ftp://cal011111.student.utwente.nl/pub/ ,   and http://www.zag.si/ ).

Limitations

Missed Tabs: Files contained in compressed form are generally not indexed (the robot would have to unpack them to see if they were really Tab files). Also, only Tab files contained at the same site as the referencing page are reported. The does miss some valid sites that are divided among more than one site. We're working on this.

Not a Tab: Perception of Tab files is not perfect - sometimes the robot is fooled. When detailed results are shown, numbers of Tab and chord lines perceived by the robot are reported. When these numbers are small there may either be a very small amount of information, or perhaps our robot was fooled. However, the robot will be getting smarter as he learns more about Tabs.

Wrong Artist: Artists identifications can be wrong if their name was present in a file containing a song by someone else. Groups with common names may also be wrongly identified.

Too Many Tabs: Some questions have too many answers! There are a lot of Tabs starting with a, for example. In this case you will get up to 500 Tabs or 100 different groupings. In this case, results may also be abbreviated. For very popular groups, it is best to search by song - as this will limit the deluge of information. Also, the more answers, the longer the robot will have to think and organize the results before shipping them to you.