Genealogy is one of those areas where you need to know how to conduct a search on-line. In this article we will only be talking about doing Google searches for genealogy research, but much of the philosophy would apply for searching on Yahoo and MSN as well.
Genealogy is one of those areas where you can NOT do a search on a particular term and only look at the first 10 results presented back to you by Google. I can’t emphasize enough that you have to go deeper, and at least down to the 20th page of returned results to get information you may need. Numerous times when doing searches on the internet, I found good information on page 20 and not on page 1 or 2 of the returned results. Many genealogists who do web pages are not optimizing their sites for the search engines such as Google, so their pages or sites will not come up near the top of the results. Don’t automatically assume that Google does a great job presented the results on page 1, for genealogy searches.
As well, to get better results for your searches you need to format your genealogy search several ways. This is best demonstrated by an example. Let’s say you wanted genealogy information on Robert Jordan in Chowan County North Carolina in the 1700’s. How would you search for this using Google?
Below are various ways you might type the search query into the search box of Google (number of returned results are in prentices). It is important to try the various ways of searching to pull in different results. Don’t just try one way of searching and walk away. The results returned below by Google on the first page were not the same, so my query did return different results on the first page. Searches are not case sensitive so I didn’t have to capitalize the name.
Note: To look for a range of dates type two periods in-between as shown below. Quotes mean return only that exact phrase in that word order. Google implies an AND between spaced out words, so no reason to type in AND. Google puts more weight on the first words in the search so “robert jordan” has the most weight.
“robert jordan” “chowan county” “north carolina” 1700..1799 (21 results)
robert jordan chowan north carolina 1700..1799 (2720 results)
robert jordan chowan carolina 1700’s (1240 results)
“robert Jordan” chowan carolina 1700’s (117 results)
I’m sure you can come up with a few more combinations. If I were searching for this information I would perform all of the searches above, and maybe more, to try and find different information. Google can’t possibly read every web page in existence to get the results you want so you have to “tweak” it to get better results, and that requires formatting your queries in different ways, and hopefully pulling up hidden gems. Good luck in your genealogy searches.
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