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The Search for A A A A A A A A A A About About About

By Peter J. Menzies

The Beginning

So, for the past few months, I’ve had this start of a song stuck in my head. It’s not much to go off of but runs with this cowboy western tune and the only part I can remember is the beginning when the pianist starts the lyrics off with “A A A A A A A A A A About About About” Memories of torturing my friends on discord by putting this song in the playlist fills me with joy, so I wanted to rediscover it.

The Search

I didn’t know the name of the artist, the song’s name, or anything else that might help me on this journey, but in the past, I’ve used youtube searching to attempt to find these lost relics of the past, so I thought I’d record this grand adventure down the youtube rabbit hole for you fine folks reading this.

Initially greeted by the homepage I go to the search bar. This isn’t my first youtube rodeo, so I expect some google magic to understand the madness I’m about to put in its search bar. The search bar is a memorable tool on the youtube website and fairly learnable too. Once taught by their grandchildren many a grandparent uses the youtube search bar religiously to find many a cat video.

Sadness, woe, and terror! The Google magic has failed me only returning what appears to be screaming animated characters! Writing this journal and documenting the process I feel explorative and my eye jumps to the music button on the side.

I click on it and it brings me to something with no screaming animated characters nor anything that appears to be of value to me or my search for the mysterious western song.

Perhaps it’s a completely new page/website/thingamajigger that needs me to hit the search button again for it to understand I want music related to the search I originally proclaimed.

It was not.

Mildly annoyed and supremely dissatisfied my eyes scan the screen again and spot the filters button near the search.

Clicking on it brings up a list of filters that matched my mental model generally well. The split for Upload date, Type, Duration, Features, and sort by felt very learnable and quite efficient for quickly finding the filter you are seeking.

After a quick scan of the filters, I wanted to select video and 4-20 minutes. I was mildly disappointed that I couldn’t select a filter limiting the video to uploads more than a year ago, but I’d imagine long ago in a boardroom somewhere the was a great debate between the value of Effectiveness and Efficiency. Allowing people to choose very specific filters would be great for Effectiveness, but the extra clutter and buttons might reduce the efficiency for the 99% of people who aren’t looking for an old video.

I click the video filter and poof! The box showing all the filters closes and shows me the results. I’m a bit peeved off by this. I wanted to put down that other filter! Feeling put out grumbling about the loss of my precious seconds lost to click the filters open again.

I apply the other desired filter and still nothing even close to what I’m looking for.

Starting to feel like this endeavor with youtube was hopeless I felt like my last chance was the search with voice. Perhaps singing the tune would let it search for the result I was looking for.

It didn’t seem to take the tune into account at all.

At this point, I felt like youtube wouldn’t be an effective tool for finding this song and I gave up the search on this usually useful website.

The Outcome

In the end, I didn’t get to find the song I was looking for using just youtube and searched for other tools on the interwebs to support this great journey.

If you would like to listen to this great song which I spent so long searching for you can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_Dyg2Dw5xI