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Customised Search - Call for Contributors

We have made a start on a customised search engine: Legal MP3 Downloads

This is raising lots of issues: commercial, legal, organisational and time. So we intend to use the blog to air these and invite participation.

The focus of the search engine reflects frustration experienced in the past with sites which quite obviously ignore copyright so we are going for a positive inclusion approach rather than a black list. This has the disadvantage that we won't pick up new sites very quickly and it will take time and effort to be comprehensive but the search results will produce legal MP3 files for download. Not subscription sites are being included they can fend for themselves. However we will include some of the big boys whilst putting most of our effort into the independents and self publishers. The idea is to help searchers find the available versions of specific pieces of music or examples of particular music genre no matter how obscure, without hooking them in to broader or longer term arrangements.

So the first call to action is seeking volunteers to act as contributors to the search engine. This is new stuff so we will need to feel our way into the organisation but I'd hope that we could keep things pretty relaxed and see how things go. Bringing human editors back into the search engine management is an interesting twist and may not come off but I think it is worth a try in a specialist area like this. So let's hear from you soon.

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