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How to find a music video by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 09/22/2011, 11:42pm PDT
Reading Lost's quest to find Asia's Don't Cry, I thought I'd put the issue more scientifically. How do you find a particular video?

Well, if you don't know the words, the only answer is to ask people, since there's no way to search for a video by content. Content has to be analyzed, that is, someone has to look at it and see what it contains. Text and to some extent spoken (or sung) material can be automatically analyzed. Anything more complicated requires someone have given what we call "metadata" or a description.

This is why you get so many false hits when you do a search for an image on Google; the program uses context and names, and in some cases volunteers who looked at some of the (literally) trillions of photos it has annexed and cataloged, to give some context as to what the photo is.

But for a video, if you can remember a few words of the song, you can search by that. Use your favorite search engine*, put the phrase in quotes, and put the word "Lyrics" which will tend to look for songs using that phrase. If you do get the artist and song title, then you can search for it on YouTube.

Let's say I want to find a song where they said, "don't be concerned, it will not harm you" is good enough even without the word "lyrics" (which doesn't need words), and finds "Elusive Butterfly". This gets two major hits, the one I knew about, the 1966 original by the songwriter, One Hit Wonder Bob Lind, and a version by Cher.

Given this, I can now search You Tube and for "elusive butterfly" I get Bob Lind, and Cher, but I also find Dolly Parton. And some guy with the Four Tops. If I can't help myself, I might listen to that one!

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* All searches in this example used Google.
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How to find a music video by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 09/22/2011, 11:42pm PDT NEW
    if you know an exact lyric you can typically just search for that on YT NT by august and everything after 09/25/2011, 12:59pm PDT NEW
 
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