Ungooglable content returns 116,000 results (0.11 seconds)

Once upon a time, when Google was young, searching for web lyrics was easy. You just type the song title, or (even better) some of the words, and the lyrics would pop up. Actually, fourteen years ago, when the sanctions were eased up, and we weren't disconnected from the interwebs (for which, as I hear, we owe to unknown Austrian moron who cut us off for no good reason - web was not on the list), the first thing I looked up on then AltaVista was "passion play". And, lo and behold, the first thing that came up was

Ostensibly motionless, the hare was trembling with excitement, for without his spectacles he was completely helpless.

Yeah, right. Google "Passion play" today.

But a search as above, for "rare bird third time around lyrics" should get you right there, right? Google knows best, doesn't it? Well, web has lost the virginity in that hole too. So here's what the search returns:

1. http://www.songlyrics.com/rare-bird/third-time-around-you-lyrics/ - no lyrics, lots of blockable content, 7 parasite sites (ad servers, click counters etc) serving scripts
2. http://www.lyricsdownload.com/album-B0000CDUYY.html actually repackages content from mp3lyrics.com plus about nine other parasite sites. Shows nothing because I scriptblocked it years ago
3. http://www.topliriklagu.com/songlyrics/lyric/third-time-around-you-song-rare-bird-singer-somebody039s-watching.htm shows that it has lyrics for whole four other songs from Rare Bird, yeah, tell me about it. 5 parasites (including Alexa)
4. http://interlyrics.com/artist-lyrics/11718/Rare-Bird has lyrics for three songs, and "please add" links on all others. Surprisingly, no parasites.
5. http://www.tunewiki.com/lyrics/rare-bird-56487.aspx - no indication as to what they have or not, you get a list of all song, each title is a link, and then, well, maybe you'll find one which will get you some text other than the most famous song of Rare Bird, and their greatest hit of all times, "No results found. Please rephrase your search and try again, or if you are logged in, add the song." Ah, the beauties of sites where they not only want your membership, but expect you to do the work for them. Four parasites (google, quantserve, microsoft, cloudfront - strange company, eh?).
6. http://www.thelyricarchive.com/album/111657/Third-Time-Around%3A-An-Introduction-to-Rare-Bird - at least shows only the album and even has the cover picture. And there's a little + link to each title, which opens a... popup window with a captcha and an editbox, please enter the lyrics, you don't even have to be a member, and click "send for review". No parasites. Ads are neatly packed in show_ads.js which is blocked without a hitch. Nice, but no content.
7. http://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=5545 - oodles of links on top of the page, list of songs, album cover, buy Rare Bird albums on ebay, no content. There's a lyrics link, leads to a complicated empty page. Just three parasites, mostly from Google.
8. http://musicvideoswiz.com/artist/Rare%20Bird/lyrics - scripts served from cloudfront, googleapis, yahoo, each song title (not even grouped by album) is a link - and no indication whether there is anything behind a link (no luck with my song either).
9. http://www.mp3-download-song.com/download/Rare-Bird_free_mp3_song_97404.html - downloads mp3 versions of the songs, less than 20 of them, and only "Sympathy" has the lyrics. For the rest, clicking on lyrics icon (greyed out but still active) leads to download page for the song, containing another similar list of songs by Rare Bird, with the same lack of lyrics. One parasite (yottacash).
10. http://listenmusic.fm/track/Third-Time-Around-by-Randy-Johnson-with-lyrics-118785 - not even Rare Bird, it's someone else with a song of the same title, mp3 download, no lyrics. Note that the link says "with lyrics". Aaargh!
11. http://www.freefox.com/mp3/-1_00/Rare-Bird-Third-Time-Around.htm - offers free download of the song, and HAS the lyrics... of "Sympathy" :slapforehead:. At lower third of the page there's a bunch of links to similar pages, few of them other Bird songs, few with a "rare" in the title, and the lower half of it completely unrelated. Their search engine has IQ equal to the shoe size of its author. One parasite
    

So, looking for lyrics is much harder than it used to be. There are so many aggregators, and they are chock full of things you find when you search, that they always come up first on Google - and they get the clicks, because you must click to discover that they are empty, so they come up first. This circle is truly vicious.

In this particular case, the search would come up empty anyway. The lyrics don't exist on the web. I searched for a few more word, an unmistakable phrase which must be (spelling correct, I assume) in the lyrics, and Google found none. Too bad, I wanted to use it as a source for the worst translation possible, as it's full of empty phrases, cliches and other stuff that make less than zero sense when translated directly. All the same, whatever you look for, you will get dozens of aggregators repeating the same text, shamelessly stealing from each other serving it without naming the source. Last time I was looking for text on a particular subject (Procol Harum), I found a total of three (3) articles about 200 times. Plus about 40 false positives, i.e. articles where someone had to go over the text and change a few words, or at least do a spellcheck.

And Google also removed the blacklisting, i.e. downvoting the links. There was a little x mark next to links, and you could go back to the search page and click it if you were pissed off. Now you can come back and click a star if you liked it. Yeah right, like you will remember to do that - my bet is that less than 1% of the people would. Maybe I could try to add them to my AdBlock+ list, so they don't appear on my searches anymore? Nope, doesn't work.

So... we need a new search engine. Something that will eliminate all those that have titles of everything and content of nothing. And these exist because Google loves them.