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Thank you, YouTube

Thursday August 13, 2009 9:01 PM By Mark La Monica

For some reason, I had the urge this morning to listen to Bell Biv DeVoe's 1990 hip-hop smoothed out on the R&B tip classic "Poison."

Call me crazy, but whatever. That's how my mind is working on this lovely Thursday a.m.

In my younger days (last week), I would have gone straight to YouTube to hear the song (since my iPod battery has flatlined and my iTunes at work is reserved only for readers' songs to use in ExploreTV videos.

Then I discovered the ease with which MTV allows you to search for videos by certain artists. So I quickly converted.

But on this morning, I decided to give YouTube one more try.

Voila! They fixed it. Whatever it was in their search algorithms, search results would return a bunch of wannabees singing or remixing real songs well ahead of the actual song.

It seems that has been addressed. Now, I can immediately find Ricky Bell, Michael Bivens and Ronnie DeVoe telling me that girl is poison instead of having to scroll or click throuh three jerks' in-car karaoke version en route to the Jersey Shore. That is poison.

Stunned by these results, I tried 10 other random song search from different artists in different genres in different decades. All produced similar search results. I care about listening to Joan Jett still loving rock 'n roll, not Johnny Jets doing a cover of it in his bathroom mirror.

So, thank you, YouTube, for once again restoring some dignity to your search results engine. I don't know what you did, nor do I want to know. Just whatever you did the first time, don't do that again.