Search Tips

This is a brief tutorial of the various capabilities of the Search Engine of the Hindi Songs Archive You can either read through all of these, or jump straight to the Examples Section to look at some examples and try to guess the syntax. Or look at the Common Mistakes people make.

=> Simple Searches
=> Multi-word Searches
=> Field Searches
=> Using Boolean Connectives ("and", "or", "not")
=> Using Regular Expressions
=> Miscellaneous Features
=> The Power Search
=> Common Mistakes People Make
=> Some Examples of Search Strings
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Simple Searches

In the simplest case you can just enter a word or a phrase and the search will return all songs in which the word or the whole phrase occurs in the song title or the header information (e.g. name of singer, name of movie, etc.). Thus, if you type "bechaaraa" (without the double quotes!) and click search, it will find all songs with the word "bechaaraa" in them. Note how the spelling is a little weird because of the the special ITRANS transliteration scheme.

If you want to look for a specific phrase, you can enter the whole phrase (e.g. "naa hotaa bechaaraa") and you'll get all songs with that whole phrase somewhere in the title.

Note 1: If you want to look for songs containing two different words, both of which occur somewhere in the song title (not necessarily one after the other) use a comma separated list as explained in the next section..

Note 2: To find all songs of a particular person (for example, a specific singer like Kishore Kumar, or a music director like C Ramchandra) use the static indexes!. Do not use this search for simple things like that. It is much faster and easier to use the indexes.

Multi-word searches

If you enter a list of words or phrases separated by commas, you will get songs in which each of the words (or phrases) occur somewhere in the header (not necessarily next to each other). Thus, if you enter "bechaaraa, dil", you will get "bechaaraa dil kyaa kare, saavan jale bhaado jale" and "ye dil, na hotaa bechaaraa, kadam, na hote avaaraa".

This search can be used for all kinds of complicated searches. Thus to locate all duets of Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhonsle, just enter "Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhonsle" and click search. To locate songs in which Manna Dey is the singer and the actor is Rajesh Khanna, enter "Manna Dey, Rajesh Khanna". Or simpler still, you can just enter "manna, rajesh". You can try really complicated stuff like "salil, lata, manna, jan nissar akhtar" which will probably find for you all Lata-Manna duets under Salil Chaudhari, with lyrics by Jan Nissar Akhtar.

Field Searches

One of the problems with the simple searches of the previous section is that they can easily get confused. Suppose, you wanted to find all Lata Mangeshkar-Asha Bhonsle duets. So you enter "Lata, Asha" and click on search. You will find that there are a lots of songs that are not Lata-Asha duets. The problem is that this search, in addition to Lata-Asha duets, found songs in which Lata sings for Asha Parekh, or Asha Sharma. Or songs in which Asha is the singer and the letters "lata" occur somewhere in the song title. (For example, "kabhii kisii ko mukammal jahaa.N nahii.n milataa". Note the "lata" in "milataa"!)

Solution 1: One way to avoid this problem is to use the pull down menu provided with the "Quick Search". Thus, when it asks "Search for ________ in 'Any Header Field'", you can click on 'Any Header Field' and change it to 'Singer Names'. Now, the search will look for "Lata" and "Asha" only in names of singers.

Solution 2: The previous solution does not work if you want to look for songs where Manna Dey sings for Rajesh Khanna. Since you are looking for a combination of a singer and an actor, you cannot pick one single field for the search. To handle such cases, you can qualify a word or a phrase with a field. Thus, you can write, "singer=manna, actor=rajesh". Similarly, you could have done "singer=lata, singer=asha" for the previous search. The the very complicated search from the previous section could have been done as "music=salil, singer=lata, singer=manna, lyrics=jan nissar akhtar".

The fields that you can use for qualifying are, title, film, singer, music, starring, lyrics, and category. The search string "film=barsaat, title=barsaat" will find all songs in which the word "barsaat" appears in both the title as well as the film.

Using Boolean Predicates

The search engine also allows you to use the boolean connectives "and", "or" and "not" to compose your search strings. These, used in combination with parentheses, allows you to create arbitrarily complex search conditions. Hence "bhiigii and (raat or palako.n)" will give you all songs in which the word "bhiigii" occurs with either "raat" or "palako.n". Hence it will find the songs "merii bhiigii\-bhiigii sii, palako.n pe rah gaye" and "bhiigii bhiigii raato.n me.n miiThii miiThii baato.n me.n".

"(singer=asha or singer=lata), singer=kishore, (not music=rahul dev burman)" will find all songs which are duets of Kishore Kumar with either Lata or Asha but the music director is not R. D. Burman. (Note that a comma and the keyword "and" can be used interchangeably.) Always remember to use proper parentheses to ensure that your search string is not mis-interpreted by the search engine.

Regular Expressions

Each of the words or phrases entered in the search string can be a regular expression. Those who have used the "perl" programming language, or the Unix "grep" utility should know how to use regular expressions. Those who aren't familiar with either, just remember a few simple ones:
=> A dot (.) can be used to mean "any character". Thus ".sha" can match "Asha" or "Usha" or even "isha".
=> A star (*) can be used to mean that the previous character may be repeated any number of times. This is very useful when you are not sure of the ITRANS spelling of a particular word. Thus "a*bhi*ma*n" can match "aabhiman" or "abhiimaan" "aabhiiman" or any of the variants.
=> A question mark (?) indicates that the previous character might or might no appear. Thus "Asha Bhon?sa?le" can match "Asha Bhosle" or "Asha Bhonsle" or "Asha Bhonsale" or "Asha Bhosale".
=> There are a whole bunch of others that I am not going to tell you about. If you really need to know, find a friend who mucks around with computers and ask him/her.

Other Miscellaneous Features

Using a double equal to sign (==) in a field search makes the search engine look for exact matches rather than sub-string searches. Thus if you ask for "Film=Barsaat" you will get only songs of film "Barsaat" and not from anything else like "Barsaat ki Raat" or "Barsaat ki ek Raat".

An exclamation mark (!) at the beginning of a word or a phrase negates the search. (i.e. it acts like a "not"). Thus if you wanted songs of Asha Bhonsle singing for R. D. Burman, but where the lyricist was not Gulzar, you might give the string "asha bhonsle, r.* d.* burman, !gulzar". Another string that you could try would be: "singer=asha, music=burman, music=!sachin, lyrics=!gulzar". (Singer must be Asha, music must by a Burman, but not Sachin, and lyrics must not be by Gulzar.)

The special word "unknown" can be used to denote a field that is empty, i.e. no information is available in the archive. Suppose you are looking for a song for which the actor was Rajesh Khanna and the movie Kudrat. If you look for "actor=rajesh and movie=kudrat" the archive finds nothing. You think the problem might be that the name of the movie might be missing from the archive. In that case you can ask for "actor=rajesh, (movie=kudrat or movie=unknown)".

The Power Search

The only difference between the power search and the quick search is that the power search searches through all the lyrics of the songs, not just the header information. Due to this, the power search is slower than the quick search, and should be used sparingly.

To search for all "Marriage Songs", you would probably enter the search string "sha*di* or dulha or ba*bu*l" which will look in the lyrics of all the songs for the words "shaadii" or "dulha" (or "dulhan") or baabuul (or minor variants of those spellings.)

The power search can also be used to search among the names of the people who contributed the songs to the ITRANS Song Book. Thus, entering the string "Venkatasubramanian K Gopalakrishnan" will give you a list of songs that were transliterated for, or contributed to the ISB by Venkat.

Common Mistakes People Make

Here are a few reasons why people usually have problems searching for what they want in the ITRANS Song Book.

Too many words in search list. If you enter a comma separated list of words to be found, remember that the search engine tries to find songs that contain ALL the words! People accustomed to using search engines like Infoseek or Alta-Vista often run into this problem. Unlike those search engines, this search engine looks for exact matches, not approximations.

The ITRANS Transliteration Scheme. If you try the search "title=diwana", you will be surprised that there are no songs with the word "diwana" in the title. The problem is that the word is spelt "diivaanaa" in the ITRANS Transliteration Scheme. So, when you specify the correct spelling "title=diivaanaa", you'll find that there are 12 matches. (The motivated reader can try to figure out why the name "John" is spelled "jaa.cn" in the ITRANS Transliteration Scheme).

Misspellings and alternative spellings. The 12 matches for "title=diivaanaa" still does not represent all the matches. This is so because the in the ITRANS Transliteration scheme, "diivaanaa" can also be spelt "dIvAnA". Or simply, the ISB might have spelling mistakes. In such cases the regular expression capabilities of the search engine come in handy. Using the string "title=di*va*na*" uncovers 18 songs.

Forgetting commas. If you try the search string "Rafi Kishore" in the hope of finding Rafi-Kishore duets, you'll find nothing. The problem is that the ISB thinks "Rafi Kishore" is one single phrase or name that it is searching for (which of course does not exist). The string "Rafi, Kishore" works much better.

Anglicized spellings. OK, here comes the tricky part! The title of the song and the actual lyrics use the ITRANS Transliteration Scheme, but the other parts of the song header (the movie name, names of actors, singers, lyricists, and music directors) use anglicized spellings. For example Raj Kapoor is spelt "Raj Kapoor" and not "raaj kapuur". Another example: the movie is called "Naseeb", but the song in it is "mere nasiib meiN ...". This can lead bizarre situations. Thus, if you wanted to find all "rain" songs that are title songs the search string you would enter is "movie=Barsaat and title=barasaat".

Search Examples

Here is a quick list of some common types of searches that can be specified:
=> Search string "bechaaraa": finds all songs with the word "bechaaraa" in the title.
=> Search string "naa hotaa bechaaraa": finds all songs with that phrase in the title.
=> Search string "bechaaraa, dil": finds all songs with the words "bechaaraa" and "dil" somewhere in the header. (Note the comma separating the words.)
=> Search string "Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhonsle": finds all Lata-Asha duets.
=> Search string "singer=manna, actor=rajesh": finds all songs in which Manna Dey sings for Rajesh Khanna.
=> Search string "(singer=asha or singer=lata) and singer=kishore and (not music=rahul dev burman)": finds all songs that are duets of Kishore Kumar with Lata or Asha and the music is by someone other than R. D. Burman.
=> Search string "a*bhi*ma*n": is a regular expression lookup for words like "abhiman", or "aabhiman", or "abhiimaan" (etc.).
=> Search string "singer=mukesh, category=ghazal": finds all songs sung by Mukesh that are Ghazals.

This site is maintained by Navin Kabra. Please send comments and suggestions to navin.kabra@usa.net The ITRANS Song Book is maintained by Anurag Shankar and a team of volunteers. Please send new songs, corrections etc to ashankar@indiana.edu).