Genealogy Searching on the Internet

Introduction

The Internet is is a huge collection of information and growing daily. For a genealogist, it can be a formidable task to locate valuable information. There are hundreds of Web search engines out there. Most of them do not provide much information of use to genealogists and some have a wealth of information if you know how to find it. You have probably used at least one of these search engines already and found thousands of hits or none. Success depends upon which search engine you use and how you define your search arguments.

The discussion here is limited to those facilities which are most apt to provide information of use to genealogists. A list of other search facilities are given under Other search engines.

The information available to each search engine is determined by several factors such as controls placed in the HTML code for the Robots which collect the data, which search engines the website manager has registered with and what each search engine manager decides is significant data for the users. While the general search engines can provide genealogical information, most successful searches are obtained from the genealogy search engines.

Search engines offer various options for you to control your searches. Understanding and using these options properly is very worthwhile.

General Search Engines

Directories

True Search Engines

Meta Search Engines

FTP Searches

People Searches

Usenet Searches

Simple searching

Using + and -

To begin with, you can instruct the search engine to find pages that must contain a certain word, words or phrase. If you enter two words into the search box (for example, bible and faith), the result of this search will include some pages which contain both words, some which will only have bible, and some with only faith. The search engines will find any page that has at least one of your keywords. But if you put a plus sign (+) before any word, then the search engine understands that all pages must include that word (or words).

Or use a minus sign (-) to tell the search engine not to find any pages with that word (or words). Here are some examples:
 

There are two exceptions to this rule. HotBot has "Match All" as default in its pull-down menu (so you don't need to use a plus sign), and Infoseek doesn't really exclude words with a minus sign from its searches; it only gives these words a lower ranking value, so that pages with these words appear toward the end of the list.

Double Quotes

All major search engines also allow you to search for phrases by using double quotes. For example, if you searched for faithful men, you would get pages which have faithful and/or men; but if you search for  "faithful men", you would only find pages with the exact phrase faithful men. Learn to use this feature and your searches will be much more profitable.

Capital Letters

Most of these search engines treat lower case search phrases as universal, but will perform a case sensitive search if you capitalize any letter. That is, if you search for bible, you'll find pages containing bible or  Bible, but  if you search for Bible, you'll only find pages containing Bible. So pay attention to your capital letters, or you might not find what you're looking for.

Using Wildcard Characters

Altavista, allows you to use wildcard characters. With Altavista you can also put an asterisk (*) at the end of a word. With HotBot, you can use the asterisk at the end or beginning of words, or use a question mark (?) to substitute any letter.

For example, typing faith* will find pages containing  faithful, faithfulness, faithfully. Typing mo?e in HotBot will find pages with more, move, mole, etc.

Advanced Searches

Boolean Searches

Except for Infoseek, the major search engines support Boolean searching. Use AND, OR and NOT according to Boolean logic. Search for faith AND bible to find pages which have both words; search for faith OR bible to find pages which have one word or the other; search for faith NOT bible to find pages which have faith but not bible.

You might think you could achieve all this with the plus and minus signs, but Boolean phrases allow you to use multiple parameters. For example, to find any page which speaks about the Bible and about faith, but which does not mention men or women, use the following search phrase: faith AND bible NOT (man OR men OR woman OR women).

Notes: In HotBot you first have to choose "Boolean Search" from the "all the words" menu. In Lycos, you need to search with Lycos Pro. In Yahoo!, select AND or OR from the search options page. And Altavista and Excite require that the NOT command be written as AND NOT.

Field Searches

If your search needs are really specific, you might need to use field searches, which Altavista, HotBot, Yahoo!, Infoseek and Lycos Pro support. You enter a "field name" followed by a colon and then a search term. Valid field names include link (which will only find the search term in links), title (only searches in titles of pages), url (only look in URLs), alt (looks in labels of images), etc.

For example, want to know which sites link to yours? Simply search for link:your_url.

The table at the end of this document lists the valid field names for each search engine.

Keywords

2. Add necessary search language codes. (do not mix symbols with Boolean)

3. Use all lower case unless you specifically want upper case.

4. When searching for persons, use the " ". ("john smith")

5. Do not use punctuation in names, ( - ' . )

6. Modify the keywords and try again depending upon what is found on the first try.

7. Use the Edit and Find in Page functions of your browser to find words within the retrieved page.

8. Do the same search in a few months to check for additions to the net.

Start Searching!

So there you are. Start using these simple tips in your favorite search engine, and your searches will be much more meaningful.

Genealogy Search Engines

Lists

Databases

Queries

Newsgroups

Files

Other search engines

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