Google is the search engine of choice for most genealogists I know, due to its ability to return relevant search results for genealogy and surname queries and its huge index. Google is much more than just a tool for finding Web sites, however, and most people surfing for information on their ancestors barely scratch the surface of its full potential. If you know what you are doing, you can use Google to search within Web sites, locate photos of your ancestors, bring back dead sites, and track down missing relatives. Learn how to Google as you've never Googled before:
Search With a Focus
Google has four important ground rules that you need to know for focused results:- Use a plus sign before words which are absolutely critical to your search. Example: powell +wills
- Use a minus sign before words that you want to be excluded from the search. This is especially useful when searching for a surname with a common usage such as rice or one which is shared with a famous celebrity such as Harrison Ford (i.e. you would enter your search as ford -harrison to exclude results with the word 'harrison').
- Use quotation marks around any two word or greater phrase to find results where the words appear together exactly as you have entered them. This is especially useful when searching for proper names (i.e. a search for thomas jefferson will bring up pages with thomas smith and bill jefferson, while searching for "thomas jefferson" will only bring up pages with the name thomas jefferson included as a phrase.
- Use OR to retrieve search results that match any one of a number of words. The default operation for Google is to return results that match ALL search terms, so by linking your terms with OR you can achieve a bit more flexibility (ie smith genealogy OR cemetery)
2. Search Without Stops
Stop words are small, common words that many search engines ignore, or don't stop for, when searching for documents that match your query. This is because these words are either too common to generate meaningful results (i.e. where, how, about... or are parts of speech like conjunctions, prepositions and adverbs (i.e. and, if, be, the...). Google tells you when it's ignoring a stop word by displaying details on the results page below the search box (i.e. "about" is a very common word and was not included in your search).There are times when searching that you will not want Google to exclude these stop words. For example, will is considered a stop word by Google, which can mess up your search results if you are searching for the will of a specific ancestor. To get around this you can either force Google to include a stop word in your search by putting a "+" sign in front of it or by enclosing your phrase of two or more words in quotation marks (i.e. "about genealogy" or "will rogers").
3. Search Suggested Alternate Spellings
Google has become one smart cookie and now suggests alternate spellings for search terms which appear to be misspelled. The search engine's self-learning algorithm automatically detects misspellings and suggests corrections based on the most popular spelling of the word. You can get a basic idea of how it works by typing in 'geneology' as a search term. While Google will return search results for pages on geneology, it will also ask you "Did you mean genealogy?" Click on the suggested alternate spelling for a whole new list of sites to browse! This feature comes in particularly handy when searching for cities and towns for which you aren't sure of the correct spelling. Type in Bremehaven and Google will ask you if you meant Bremerhaven. Or type in Napels Italy, and Google will ask you if you meant Naples Italy.
