Another brick wall?
At some point all family history research leads to a 'dead end' where leads just seem to dry up and many of the posts on this site relate to finding 'missing links'. I've had some great success using the following technique and I hope it helps others.
Firstly, you need to understand how the internet works, or at least how the search engines work, e.g. Google, Yahoo, etc, etc. For the purposes of this example we’ll focus on Google. It uses a system of keywords to match your query (the visitor) with web pages delivering that content (the providers). These keywords are the search terms you (and millions of others), type on the search bar. The results passed back are those pages, or providers, that meet the search term. As you can imagine, competition by the large commercial organisations to be returned in a good ‘list position’ is fierce and so large amounts of marketing spends are focussed on ensuring ‘high ranking’ within the search engines.
OK? So what does that mean for us? Last month, July 2009, approximately 152,000 people typed in a search for ‘Genealogy’. I’ve just typed the same search into Google. 73.6 million web pages were returned in the results! Not surprisingly most of the top positions are taken by either the main database vendors or resellers (affiliates) of the major vendors.
Now the internet contains THOUSANDS of personal websites where researchers (just like you), publish their family tree hoping to make connections. The problem is they have almost no chance of reaching top positions on search results and so are difficult to find.
So how do we find them?
1. Be More (very) Specific
What were these people typing ‘genealogy’ actually looking for? Genealogy Scotland, Genealogy book, genealogy Smith? Who knows, but they were presented with was the main commercial vendors keen to get some subscriptions.
2. Combine keywords + phrases
Now let’s try: genealogy scotland + smith (try it)
We’re getting closer, about 872,000 results, quite a few but much more specific and beginning to return some interesting ‘personal’ websites.
3. Search rules (syntax)
Did you notice the ‘+’ sign in the example above? To the search engine this means ‘and’ so, the results returned will contain; genealogy OR scotland AND smith.
Now try this: “genealogy scotland” + smith
Note: The quotes around "genealogy scotland"means to match the EXACT PHRASE and this is particularly useful when looking for specific individuals e.g. "John William Smith".
So the search above returned about 19000 results, much better, and some very specific sites containing personal family history pages.
As you can see the best search results come from being very specific. Of course you can vary these searches to include placenames, dates, etc, etc. The same rules apply to most of the major search engines. One last thing, most of the search engines include an 'Advanced' search button, this will further allow inclusion / exclusion of certain terms, dates, etc.
For more fantastic search tips I'd certainly recommend The Genealogist's Internet
Rools about speling!!
Genealogy, geneology, family history, ancestry, whatever you call it and however you spell it ,like me, you’re probably trying to learn more about your Scottish family tree.
Notice the title? Genealogy, geneology, family history, famaily history. Now this is no mistake, why? Because every day thousands of people either search, or publish details, on the internet using these common misspellings and if I didn't include them on this site then people using these words wouldn't find the site!
I've read a number of articles on getting started guides within the main ancestry databases and the advice given is always to spell geenealogy properly so as to appear professional and informed and I can understand the reasoning but there are a few downsides;
For example, let's just say that I've got a distant cousin who has just published a full family history of Bob Smith. He's done a great job, all of Bob's siblings, children, places of residence, etc, etc. Unfortunately my distant cousin made a typo and entered a title of "The Geenealogy of Bob Smith". Now, some time later I come along and start searching for the elusive Bob. I go along to Google, Yahoo or whatever and carefully type "Bob Smith" + genealogy. Guess what? No results! Why? because Google looked at genealogy AND geenealogy and thought nope that doesn't match! Throughout this site you will find instances of misspellings and the correct spelling. What I'm trying to do here is capture the searches of those people who have simply mistyped a word.
The same rules obviously apply when looking for placenames, surnames, etc, etc. So remember, combine common misspellings with your surname searches and I'll guarantee that you will begin to discover some great sites that you would otherwise miss.