Joe Offer wrote:

The "Ballad Index Song List with Song Description" is a great idea, but it's such a big file that it tends to crash my browser. I'm glad you have the "short contents" file also. I open that file, and then use CTRL-F to search it. I use it all the time.

A file with 30,000 links in it is always going to put pressure on browsers, and throwing in 60,000 div tags just makes it worse. :-( But there isn't any real way to shrink it. It does work on some machines -- it loads almost instantly in Firefox on both Intel and ARM macs, e.g.

The alternative is the Google or DuckDuckGo search engines, but they're both surprisingly bad (DuckDuckGo being worse than Google); they aren't good at figuring out what is important in a bibliographic entry.

I'm always thinking about ways to make this easier, but time I spend programming is time I don't spend researching, and given that my programming skills are a third of a century out of date, I'm probably more usefully employed in researching. :-)

For people who are going to use the Index a lot -- song researchers, e.g. -- I genuinely recommend downloading the Ballad Index software, which is based on FileMaker Pro. Its search options are vastly superior to what Google does, because it allows searching by fields.