Thanks ^^ We're still working on trying to make it even speedier.
And yes, if you link your Last.fm account we scrobble your listens. If you're listening to something embarrassing or just letting people use your account to add music at a party or something, you can disable scrobbling for the current session (until you refresh the page) by clicking on the Gear in the top right, choosing Settings, Connect, then clicking the "Disable Scrobbling for this session" button.
The sidebar will shrink to a super narrow version if your browser window is narrow enough, but there's not currently a button to toggle it. There was at one point during the redesign though, so it's still a good possibility it will come back if there is user demand for it.
I do have a suggestion, which may or may not be a terrible idea. If somebody does a perfect search for an artist, why not go directly to that artists page instead of a search page? If I type "Supertramp", I'm probably not looking for a genre or album by that name.
I suppose it could have adverse effects in corner cases (common sounding artist names like "rock" maybe?), but I bet there's a way to determine with pretty good accuracy if they're trying to do a search or go directly to an artist page.
If we find an exact match, we should feature the artist above the song results. Not exactly going straight to the artist's page, but just one click away.
I wrote about half that feature and I made extra sure that something like "rock" should highlight the Rock genre and "kid rock" should highlight the artist and "party rock" should highlight the album.
Oh I see, I figured Artists were just listed above songs. I didn't realize it made guesses about your search. Okay, cool, that's neat. I guess you guys opted to show search results in all cases even if you were pretty sure you knew what the person was looking for - which is fair.
And yes, if you link your Last.fm account we scrobble your listens. If you're listening to something embarrassing or just letting people use your account to add music at a party or something, you can disable scrobbling for the current session (until you refresh the page) by clicking on the Gear in the top right, choosing Settings, Connect, then clicking the "Disable Scrobbling for this session" button.
The sidebar will shrink to a super narrow version if your browser window is narrow enough, but there's not currently a button to toggle it. There was at one point during the redesign though, so it's still a good possibility it will come back if there is user demand for it.