There are many websites like FamilySearch.com and Ancestry.com that allow you to search their databases and records for your ancestors. But what happens when you’ve searched these sites and you still need more? There are billions of websites on the Internet and each day that number grows. A Search Engine is a way for you to search the entire Internet rather than just the records on a specific site. However, because the Internet contains so much information, knowing how to properly use the search engines is critical.
A Search Engine allows you to search millions of other websites from a single place. Some search engines aren’t as useful as others, and not all search engines index the same pages. The most popular search engines are:
http://www.google.com/ 49.2%
http://www.yahoo.com/ 23.8%
http://www.msn.com/ 9.6%
http://www.aol.com/ 6.3%
http://www.ask.com/ 2.6%
Others 8.5%
These are the ones I have found most useful for general searches
http://www.google.com/
http://www.alltheweb.com/
http://www.altavista.com/
http://www.wisenut.com/
Search engines do not find every single page on the web, in fact most search engines only search a small percentage, that is why it is important to use several different search engines. Each Search engine will search different areas of the web.
Advanced Searching
Google is my favorite search engine. If I go to Google and search the phrase Mayflower genealogy, Google finds about 210,000 pages where those words are found. When I enter “Mayflower genealogy” it only returns 4,230. What is the difference? The quotation marks.
“Operators” are the words used to instruct search engines how to deal with multiple terms. The most common operators are
And (+): Using the ‘and’ operator means the page must contain both words, for example Lewis and Clark would find all pages where both Lewis and Clark were found. This is especially helpful if you want to include words that would normally be excluded like how, where, I, is, etc.
Or: The web page must contain at least one of the words. So, Lewis or Clark would find all pages where there was Lewis or Clark found on the page.
Not (-): This term is useful for excluding pages were a specific term is found. For example I searched for the term Fenn and there were several pages from Canada. If I know that I’m not looking for people in British Columbia, I could enter Fenn not Canada.
“”: Using quotes around a phrase forces the search engine to only look for the entire phrase. So “Lewis and Clark” is a different search from Lewis and Clark.
~ : Google will automatically search for variants of the root of a word (genealogy or genealogical). The tilde before a word tells Google to search for synonyms of the word. Mayflower ~genealogy returned 1,190,000 results because is also found results with family, tree, history, etc.
*: Red * Blue would return results where the page contained red and blue seperated by one of more words.
site: Search only one website admission site:www.stanford.edu returns admission topics only on the Stanford.edu website.
date: Search only a range of months Olympics date: 3 returns topics that goggle has found or have been posted in the last 3 months.
safesearch: Exclude adult-content safesearch: sex education returns sex education material without returning adult sites.
link: linked pages link:www.familysearch.org returns all websites that link to the FamilySearch.org site.
related: Related pages related: familysearch.org returns all web pages that Google thinks are similar to the page you enter.
Other helpful hints:
If you are searching a common name like John Smith, try entering another uncommon name in the search that would be a close family member. If John Smith had a brother named Elias, entering the brother’s name should narrow your search.
If you don’t find anything now, try again in a few months. When I first taught this class “Mayflower Genealogy” returned 508 results. Today it returned 4230 results.
Search engines can sometimes direct you to new sources of information. Often you will find other family’s personal websites that may contain pictures or other important documentation on the people you are looking for. Sometimes you won’t find the information you are looking for on the web page itself, but you will find people’s email addresses and contact information and instead of you doing the research all by yourself, you could have several people all working together and helping each other.
