Google Custom Search

There are a lot of places where you can find the artist that you want to play, but going through each and every one of them is very tedious. You could use the standard Google search but going through page after page with results that don't actually give you just the music is like watching paint dry. Google does offer some extra code that you can use (operators) but if you use them too much then there's a risk that you get blocked from doing more searches, yipes.

However there is a workaround for this without using code and you get to decide what sites are the only ones you want the results from. This is really great since it can include sites that are normally displayed after page five in the results (like filetram or filestube). To get this you only have to make a Google Custom Search-engine, add the (list of) website(s) that you want to get the results from, choose the design and you have your own search-engine. If you're using Firefox with the Add to Search Bar-add on, you can right-click the search-field and add it as the standard search-engine.

Examples
This is one I made that includes (among others) Grooveshark, WeAreHunted, Bandcamp, Soundcloud (who switched from http to https?). I didn't include Youtube, MySpace, Faceborg or Torrent-sites since those really mess up the results.

Find that Artist!

This is a temporary one for testing out the use of mp3blogs, these usually don't show up that well in the results since most of them have a very low pagerank. There's a maximum of 5000 sources/domains that you can add per profile. I'm not sure yet if that is per user-account or per search engine.
Find That Artist! (on mp3blogs)

The reason that the blog search is temporary is that maintaining the list is a bit wonky in the Google interface. For instance: there is no option for mass deletion and with more then 20 it gets very tedious. I'm solving this by starting a Google-doc spreadsheet, add tabs for the larger genres that will include a row for the blog-fields and a row for the subgenre-fields. That way I can make extra notes or sort by sub genre.

Next example:
Hip-Hop It's based on 68 blogs (PM me if you want the list) and one blocked blocked URL (http://www.africanhiphop.com/forum/). The rreason for the block is that the search results contained a lot of chatter instead of actual music.

This test version is called Rock (http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=014209395896937011977:utmcptld120) but it only contains blogs with punk, garage, mod, freakbeat. As a test I did a search on the first artist mentioned by the last blog added, and saw that it didn't show up in the results. It turns out that although Google (owner of Blogspot) is actually changing the domain for me from, in this case, http://garagerocks.blogspot.com to http://garagerocks.blogspot.nl it is unable to show me search results for the nl-version. This is probably because they want to avoid duplicate search results. Thankfully you can easily compensate for that by doing a search+replace on the "blogspot.nl" to "blogpost.com".