Finding New Music with Google Sets

So here's something cool. Google Labs has this online set completion tool called Google Sets.

Basically, you give it a list of items, and it finds you other similar items. For example, sending it "Beef" and "Pork", brings up "Poultry", "Chicken", "Seafood", "Lamb" etc.

It appears that they harness their massive search history database, and use some kind of Bayesian or LSI classification system to produce results. But then again, it's Google, and likely way more complicated than that.

Since I'm a big jazz fan, and jazz is a hugely unpopular genre among the masses, finding new artists is not very easy.

So let's see what happens when I plug in the names of two popular jazz guitarists, "Pat Metheney" and "John Scofield".

*type*type*click*

Bill Frissel, Charlie Haden, Lyle Mays, Dave Holland, and many more.

Okay, so they're not all guitarists, but they're jazz; and I did find some new interesting names.

I wonder what happens if I add a few more names to the initial list: "Scott Henderson" and "Wayne Krantz".

*type*type*click*

Awesome! Mike Stern, Al DiMeola, Larry Coryell,
John McLaughlin, Allan Holdsworth, Robben Ford, Pat Martino, Larry Carlton, and on and on and on.

Just what I need. Some of them were even in the Fusion sub-genre of Jazz, like the names in the original list (well, except Metheney).

BTW, you'll yield much better results by enclosing multi-word search queries (like ours above) within double-quotes.