OK, I am a newbie to the abc trad/folk archiving scene. Forgive me if this sounds stupid to old hands, but... What baffles me about JC's tune finder is the sheer number of results it returns.

How do I interpret, or rank, or even wade through, all those versions? is there any way to tell which are "more authentic" or to identify regional styles?

It is a bit overwhelming to be faced with the stack of html tables (is there some reason for their grouping into tables of differing widths?) of over 100 versions of the target tune. I don't know how to interpret much of the terse header format.

I wish (I know this is asking a lot of the s'ware) that there was some indication of how similar each tune is to some canonical "average" of all the notation, so that I could identify strange versions vs very minor variants. As it is, I tend to look at half a dozen or so, realise that none of them is the version that my teacher showed me... and give up because it would take all night to review all 148 versions of, say, "Blarney Pilgrim".

Is there a more intelligent way to approach this daunting data dump?