a full text search would include second lines and choruses, would it not? and titles.

I suppose it depends on the usage of fulltext. I suspect I have been inconsistant but have mostly been using it to refer to the mySQL fulltext searches. In my case, there is an index built up from Song Title and SongLyrics and the relevant searches search both columns but I could just as easily have a fulltext search on just one column.

Susan, I don't know about the mudcat search but the mySQL fulltext searches, the search simply ignores certain words, eg. a search for "The Wild Rover" would only search for "Wild Rover". The fact it doesn't use the word "The" doesn't prevent "The Wild Rover" being found but a search for "The" would yeild no results. I would suspect the Mudcat one works the same way.

With MySQL at anyrate, such things are customisable but mine is left at the default list of "stopwords" and has a minimum word length of 4.

As for backgrounds, seeing as they seem to crop up a few times. I have never worked professionaly as a programer, analyst, etc. The clostest I ever got to computers was when I had a job entitled "systems co-ordinator" for production control with a white goods company. I would say the users side was important to me.