After reading a press release about the new Owl Music Search, created in conjunction with Creative Commons, I thought I'd take it for a test drive. The search engine works like this: Upload a song, highlight your favorite part of the song, Owl examines the clip and offers "hundreds of songs similar to yours" based on sound similarity. The search engine results pull from an index of over 10,000 songs from ccMixter and Magnatune.

Looks good on paper. In practice, Owl Music Search is a disappointment bordering upon the comedic. Recommended songs were rarely similar to the referenced song. Outside of a similar time signature, most of the site's recommendations bore no similarity to my test songs. Nor was I impressed by the songs' quality; I would go back and listen to only one. At best, one could say Owl Music Search is a victim of its youth -- its catalog is too shallow to result in good matches. At worst, and more accurately, Owl Music Search fails music fans with even the slightest level of savvy. Until it achieves far better performance, people should opt for better recommendation engines such as Last.fm or Pandora.

I listened to the first page of results of every query. Following is the title and description of the uploaded song, and a description of the songs on the first page of query results.

• Sonic Youth's "Reena," a midtempo, guitar-driven post-punk song. Results: A gothic/industrial song; a run-of-the-mill Radiohead soundalike; a nu-metal song; and a trance-inducing world-fusion track with a soloing sitar. Grade: F

• The Whigs' "Technology," a punchy rock song. Results: One hard rock/metal song; one experimental electronics/breaks song; one slow, exotic electronic track; one jazz-heavy guitar pop song; and one straight-up pop/rock song. Grade: D

• Tito Puente's "Oye Como Va," a perky salsa song. Results: a guitar rag; a classical song; an electronic-heavy hip hop song; a solo acoustic guitar song; and a straight-up hip hop song. Grade: F

• Gillian Welch's cover of Radiohead's "Black Star," a quiet song with only voice and two guitars. Results: two classical songs; one traditional Irish folk song; a song that crossed trance with hip hop; and one standard signer-songwriter song. Grade: D

The press release refers to Owl Music Search's as the "world's first true music search engine." It boasts and makes revolutionary claims. The truth is a different story. The technology holds promise, but Owl Music Search does not deliver. A better index of music is needed, and search results with at least a basic level of correlation is required.