WapReview

Song Lyrics is neat little mobile web application that lets you look up the lyrics to popular songs. It's hosted on Twilightwap.com, a mobile portal that claims to be the world's largest with 7 million daily pageviews! The Song Lyrics site has lyrics for 320,000 songs.

When I first heard about this I thought that the way a lyrics search site should work is that you enter a snippet of lyrics and the site does a full-text search to find all songs containing that phrase.

I had this blues refrain, "feel like a ballgame on a rainy day" running through my head and wanted to find out who the artist was and get the full lyrics.

Unfortunately, Song Lyrics doesn't work that way, you have to enter the song title or artist to search for lyrics. Given that limitation the site works fairly well. You enter a full or partial song title or artist name, the site returns a list of matching titles and lets you read the full text of your chosen song's lyrics right on your phone.

Search capabilities are limited and a little buggy. But once you figure out the limitations it's a fun and useful site. Song Lyrics searches for titles or artists that contain any of the words in your search phase. Putting a phase in quotes doesn't change this. Searching artists for "Grateful Dead" returns all artists with either "Grateful" or "Dead" in their names. The Grateful Dead themselves appear 20th in the results.

Searching for titles has an additional wrinkle. Results that match your query appear first, which is good . But after the matching results, Song Lyrics keeps listing song titles that have nothing to do with your search. The irrelevant results seem to be the same ones every time - no matter what you search for. Usability isn't hurt much as long as you know to ignore any results not containing your keywords.

I do think a full-text mobile lyrics search would be cool but I haven't found one yet. But Google's transcoded web search for mobile works pretty well for finding lyrics. I Entered "feel like a ballgame on a rainy day" into Google on my phone and the first hit had the lyrics. Digging a little deeper into Google revealed the song is Chuck Willis' 1954 "I Feel So Bad" which was later covered by Little Milton, Otis Rush, Elvis and The Foghead.