Google for Genealogists

Google's mission statement

• “Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

As of March 2006,Google users can:

• search through approximately 11.3 billion web pages

• search through approximately 1.3 billion images

• Read millions of messages

If printed:

• the pages being indexed would result in a stack more than 700 miles high.

Google

So how does Google make money?

Google’s Motto

Don’t be evil

Basic Concepts

• static web pages

• dynamic web pages

Google Searches

• Google will find most of the information that you and I post on the web, along with more information published by tens of thousands of other individuals and societies.

• Google will not find the information stored within the databases of the big sites: Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org and others.

Two popular types of search engines:

• searchable subject indexes – Yahoo is a searchable subject index

• full-text search engines– Google is a FULL TEXT search engine

Google searches by words

• Boolean logic

• Upper/lower case is ignored

• “Trivial words” are ignored: I, a, the, of, etc.

Boolean AND is Assumed

A search of: John Smith Denver Colorado

Is the same as: John AND Smith AND Denver AND Colorado

This can be changed by specifying Boolean terms

• "John Smith" AND "Denver, Colorado" (the AND may be omitted)

• This search will return results that contain both phrases

Other Boolean searches can help

• (John OR William) AND Smith AND Denver AND (Colorado OR CO)

John Smith of Denver, CO

John Smith in Denver, Colorado

William Smith Colorado Mining Company in Denver, Texas

Genealogy challenges

• A search for Washington Harvey Eastman

• Will produce many “hits” relating to photography in Washington, DC as well as references to many people named Harvey or Washington!

Genealogy challenges

• A search for “Washington Harvey Eastman” (with the quote marks)

• Will not produce references to:– Washington H. Eastman– Washington Eastman– W. H. Eastman

Etc.

Genealogy challenges

You can use a minus sign, meaning “NOT”

A search for: Washington Harvey Eastman –Kodak

Should eliminate most references to photography

Google’s Special Syntaxes

• intitle:– Restricts your search to the titles of Web

pages• Example:

intitle:”george bush”

Google’s Special Syntaxes

• inurl:– Restricts your search to the URLs of web

pages• Example:

inurl:help

Will return: http://www.eogn.com/helpfile.html

Google’s Special Syntaxes

• intext:– Searches only the body text, ignoring link

text, URLs and titles.

Google’s Special Syntaxes

• inanchor:– Searches for text in a page’s anchors

(links).• Example:

inanchor:”Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter”

Google’s Special Syntaxes

• site:– Allows you to narrow the search by a site

or a top-level domain• Examples:

– familysearch.org– Ancestry.com– edu

Google’s Special Syntaxes

• link:– Returns a list of pages that link to the

specified URL• Example:

link:http://www.eogn.com

Google’s Special Syntaxes

• cache:– Finds a copy of a web page that Google

indexed even if that page is no longer available today or has since changed its contents.

• Example:cache:www.eogn.com

Google’s Special Syntaxes

• daterange:– Limits your date to a particular date or

range of dates that a page was indexed.

– Note #1: It is the date that the page was INDEXED by Google, not the page CREATION date!

– Note #2: Date format must be in Julian dates

Google’s Special Syntaxes

• filetype:– May specify to search only for PDF, Word

(DOC), PowerPoint (PPT), Excel (XLS) or other file types.

Google’s Special Syntaxes

• related:– Finds pages that are related to other

pages. • Example:

related: www.eogn.com

Returns a list of genealogy newsletters as well as a list of other newsletters owned by the owner of eogn.com.

Google’s Special Syntaxes

• info:– Provides a page of links to more

information about a specified URL

Google’s Special Syntaxes

• phonebook:– Looks up telephone numbers

• Example: phonebook:remling syracuse ny

Advanced Search

• Query Word Input

• Language

• Filtering

• File Format

• Date

Advanced Search

Setting Preferences

• Language

• Filtering

• Number of Results

• Results Window

Setting Preferences

Search news groups

Need more information?

http://www.google.com/support

or

http://www.google.com/help