However, when I searched using song lyrics, Google often came up short. Searching for “I walk alone,” for example, brought up a song called “I Walk Alone,” from a WWE Raw wrestling album produced in 2007. It did not, however, bring up a song that famously repeats those words over and over again– “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” from Green Day’s 2004 album American Idiot.

I couldn’t help but have the following thought when I read this: Of course the result didn’t come up. The words repeated over and over again. Google’s spam filters probably thought the song was a case of keyword stuffing!

http://www.pcworld.com/article/174654/handson_googles_music_search_is_just_soso.html

Really? You would call Pandora more exploratory than Last.fm? Pandora does allow you, the user, to give relevance feedback on the ranked lists of songs that they present to you, so that by itself is already more interactive than Google currently allows. But unless you switch stations completely (i.e. issue a new query) you will continue to get song in the order that Pandora wants to feed them to you. No matter how diverse Pandora might make these lists, diversity != exploratory. Non?

Last.fm is much more exploratory, and much heavier on the HCIR. Last.fm is still plagued by collaborative filtering, and I wish there were a way to get away from that more. But at least it lets you choose your own path and pivot points through that filter, and you can wind up with an overall pathway very different than what any single collaborative filtering algorithm might have recommended.