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.

Life without a car

Now this is where I definitely see the difference between the US and Serbia. First of all, let's see why did I need the car there? For one, to get the groceries. That's most of the driving. Then, occasionally driving daughter to school (long story, actually, the whole last year I had to drive, because her school was 8 miles away, and due to budget cuts the school bus would take a hour and a half - that would be about a hundred hours of her life for the whole year). Going to the beach, a few times a year.

Scratch all that.

Groceries - don't need a car, the next supermarket isn't two miles away, it's two blocks away. And we're at the edge of town. If we were closer to a major street, we'd have three or more within a few blocks, plus a butcher's shop, an exchange office, couple of kiosks, a bakery and a Chinese discount store (yep, they're everywhere). So for the daily shopping, we walk; for more than that, ride a bicycle few blocks more (no more than 1,5 miles altogether) and enjoy the wider choices.

I walked to school all the time. The school is at the same place. For elementary schools there's a school bus now, in cases when the school covers a larger area (yes, we have fewer kids but city isn't shrinking), but for high schools it's walk or take a bus.

What if it's night, or raining, or we buy something that can't be carried? Most shops will deliver it to your door, if it's anything larger than a TV. For everything else there's the taxi. Cabs are very cheap - you can get across town for less than $3. Going out of town, you cut a deal with the driver, and there it depends, but you generally pay between 2 and 3 bus fares. If you share a ride, it's exactly the bus price for each passenger (minus the concourse ticket that the bus station would charge, which is about 65 cents), in the region of about $10 for 50 miles. The bus itself isn't bad, except the service in some areas has gone sparse - some routes I remember as regular are canceled, so to places where you once had 4 or 5 of them in a day, you now have two. Or they don't run weekends.

And having a car has its serious downsides. The new traffic safety law is severe, and in some aspects, ridiculous. The amount (and cost) of equipment you must have in the car is running up a considerable cost, plus the risk of a cop catching you miss one of those and writing you a hefty fine, plus taking off points off your license. Then, the gas(oline!) is expensive, it's 1,20€ per liter, which comes close to $6/gallon. Yes, the distances are shorter, but not that much. People manage by installing propane/butane tanks in their cars (which is completely legal in Europe - and completely impossible in the US, I wonder who lobbied for that), which is much cheaper, or drive diesels (and European diesel is much cleaner than the one in US). Diesel costs about the same as gas, at least the even cleaner Eurodiesel, but then European diesel cars consume far less - to the tune of 40mpg or better.

The sum total of this is that I don't feel like buying a car. I'm a happy walker/pedalist/cab rider.