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4) Bring Sites Back From the Dead
How many times have you found what looks to be a very promising Web
site, only to get a "File Not Found" error when clicking on the link?
Genealogical Web sites seem to come and go every day as webmasters change file
names, switch ISPs, or just decide to remove the site because they can no longer
afford to maintain it. This doesn't mean the information is always gone forever,
however. Hit the Back button and look for a link to a "cached" copy at the end
of the Google description and page URL. Clicking on the "cached" link should
bring up a copy of the page as it appeared at the time that Google indexed that
page, with your search terms highlighted in yellow. You can also return Google's
cached copy of a page, by preceding the page's URL with 'cache:'. If you follow
the URL with a space separated list of search words, they will be highlighted on
the returned page. For example: cache:genealogy.about.com surname will
return the cached version of this site's homepage with the term surname
highlighted in yellow.
5) Find Related Sites
Found a site that you really like and want more? GoogleScout can help
you find sites with similar content. Hit the Back button to return to your
Google search results page and then click on the Similar Pages link. This
will take you to a new page of search results with links to pages which contain
similar content. The more specialized pages (such as a page for a specific
surname) may not turn up many relevant results, but if you are researching a
particular topic (i.e. adoption or immigration), GoogleScout can help you find a
large number of resources very quickly, without having to worry about selecting
the right keywords. You can also access this feature directly by using the
related command with the URL of the site that you like (related:genealogy.about.com).
6) Follow the Trail
Once you've found a valuable site, chances are that some of the sites which link
to it may also be beneficial to you. Use the link command along with a
URL to find pages which contain links pointing to that URL. Enter
link:genealogy.about.com and you'll find about 3,200 pages which link to the
homepage of genealogy.about.com. You can also use this technique to find
out who, if anyone, has linked to your personal genealogy site.
7) Search Within a Site
While many major sites have search boxes, this isn't always true of smaller,
personal genealogy sites. Google comes to the rescue again, however, by allowing
you to restrict search results to a specific site. Just enter your search term
followed by the site command and the main URL for the site you wish to
search in the Google search box on the main Google page. For example,
military site:www.familytreemagazine.com pulls up 150+ pages with the search
term 'military' on the Family Tree Magazine Web site. This trick is
especially useful for quickly finding surname information on genealogy sites
without indexes or search capabilities.
8) Cover Your Bases
When you really want to make sure you haven't missed a good genealogy site,
enter allinurl:genealogy to return a list of sites with genealogy
as part of their URL (can you believe that Google found more than 10 million?).
As you can tell from this example, this is a better option to use for more
focused searches, such as surnames or locality searches. You can combine
multiple search terms, or use other operators such as OR to help focus your
search (i.e. allinurl:genealogy france OR french). A similar command is
also available to search for terms contained within a title (i.e.
allintitle:genealogy france OR french).
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