In case you dozed off in front of your monitor and somehow missed it, this week Google quietly launched its music search application. Basically, you can search Google for any song, either by typing in the title, artist, or even snippet of lyric in the regular Google search bar. It should cough up information about the song and a choice of online sales outlets, all nicely sorted. Now being the geeks we are and always game to stuff like this, we thought we’d test it to see how well Google knows Don.

Litmus test number one. We typed in the lyric, “you can hedge your bet on a clean Corvette,” and bingo, Heavy Metal Takin’ a Ride appeared at the top of the page. So far, so good.

Then we fed it, “never surrender” knowing there’s gonna be a million different matches. On the first try, we got a movie and pages of Corey Hart but no Don. After we typed in “let out a roar it’ll be good for you. Never surrender,” presto, up popped Don and a reference to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Not bad.

We knew it’d have to fail sometime. So we entered “if I can’t have it all, just a taste will do,” looking for Visions by the Eagles. Ah ha! Man over machine. That search query didn’t return any songs on the first page but the results did educate us as to whether or not dogs have taste buds.

Bottom line? We usually find what we’re looking for by digging through YouTube, without the links to phony sites, spyware and spambots on Google. And YouTube is still, amazingly, ad free.