Find Album Wizard - greatest hits and misses
In an
earlier entry, I recorded an attempt to locate an album in the Windowsmedia database.
Searching on Artist = Vangelis : this gives me 5 hits
Exact match Vangelis (Electronica & Dance : 87 albums)
Exact match Vangelis (2 albums)
Exact match Vangelis (NewAge : 11 Albums)
Exact match Vangelis (25 albums)
Vangelis Papazoglou (World: 1 album)
Instead of the more useful:
Exact match Vangelis (125 albums)
Vangelis Papazoglou (1 album)
I thought to go back and see if Windowsmedia was actually grouping entries by genre (e.g. Electronica & Dance, NewAge etc). This turns out not to be the case. If you select the entry "Vangelis (NewAge : 11 Albums)" and proceed to the next step of the wizard, then you find the Blade Runner soundtrack which has its genre recorded as O.S.T. (i.e. Original Soundtrack). So what's the point of the genre references in the search results????
Of course this sounds a bit petty, but it reflects an abundance of poor design and, in some cases, over-design of both server and client software. Don't for a minute think that Microsoft does and will only handle musical metadata on their servers. I see this as an excellent testcase of their ability to handle all sorts of data, or to build saleable platforms for handling user data. Will MSN Search be this crummy? Will their desktop search and future file-system implementations act so randomly??