Issue 18.15
According to Alexa Global Traffic Rank, Google is the number one search engine. Others, in order, are Bing, Yahoo! Search, Ask.com, Aol.com, Wow.com, WebCrawler, MyWebSearch, Infospace, and info.com, DuckDuckGo, Contenko.com, Dogpile and Alhea.com. All of them are a source to search on the Internet. Search engines are not specific for genealogy, but they can be. They are free to use, and paid for by the ads on the site.
Doing a search is easy, you simply type one or more search terms into the search box on the search engine’s web page and hit the enter key. You may have a search box right on the toolbar of your web browser, or you can go to www.google.com. Type in the word or phrase that best describes the information you want to find, into the search box. I use the search engines to find family history information. For example if I want to find out about a particular family in a particular county, I can type in Sullivan AND Duplin, and it will find sites that include both the words Sullivan and Duplin. This may or may not be about genealogy, so I can also add the word “genealogy” or “family history” or “family Tree.”
Common names will bring up a lot of hits because we are searching the entire internet! Jones brings up 944 million results in .69 seconds. I need to add other words to narrow it down. When I am researching, I add the names of the parents, or the names of a husband and wife, and search. Typing in Josephus Johnson Sarah Coats and pressing enter in Google.com finds all kinds of records that are specifically related to this couple. I can also add quotations around the names to narrow it further. After the sites are searched, I can click the links and it will take me from the search page to the actual website with the information.
Different search engines will provide different results. If you don’t find what you are looking for using Google, chances are another search engine could have explored the web and found it. These engines search FindAGrave, ancestry.com, FamilySearch, histories; Google digitized books, individual’s web pages on genealogy, all sorts of sites housing family history. I have found wills, war records, obituaries, stories, newspaper articles, photos, and so forth using search engines. So Google your ancestors and see what you can discover.
For more information, contact Shanna Jones shannasjones@msn.com