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Material helpful to your research may already exist on the internet. Even though the number of sites devoted to genealogy research continues to rise, searching the internet with a general purpose search engine can yield valuable and, sometimes, surprising results. I’ve provided a search entry box of my favorite search engine for you to use, since my examples are based on searches with it.
Hint: If you want to use this as a “tutorial,” print this page out so that you can stay with the search engine.
This page provides some ways that I’ve found useful in finding genealogy information on the internet. As I discuss these methods, I will describe the results that I get when I perform the searches. Since the internet is constantly changing, it is likely that your results will vary from mine, even if you use the exact same search terms.
Note: In doing the example searches as I developed this page, I actually found pages with information that
were helpful to me in my own research.
Using the “Google” search engine above, enter a surname that you are interested in and the word “genealogy” (without the quotation marks or any other punctuation).
Oh-by-the-way note: Google
was a relatively newcomer as an internet search engines when I
first created this page back in 1999. Today, it is consistently
ranks #5 or better among all websites, ranking above Ebay, Amazon,
and AOL.
For my example, I entered:
Shinn genealogy
The search didn’t take long and came back with 5,490 pages.
That's 10 times as many pages as there were for the same search in
1999. That’s a bit much and searches can often be narrowed by adding another word. For my search, I added “Moses” at the end. This resulted in about
702 pages for
Shinn genealogy Moses
(with the #1 spot being the original location for this web
page). Rearranging the words and the use of quotation marks can improve results.
“Moses Shinn” genealogy
produced a far narrower search, with only
71 hits.
Note: Google filters it's
search results to provide you with what it believes is the most
"relevant results," omitting everything else. To see the
omitted results, go to the bottom of the last page of results and
click on the link.
Knowing that Moses Shinn's wife was Mary Shinn, a
cousin, I altered the search once more, including her name in quotes
and ended up with 9 pages. Eliminating the word genealogy gave
me a total of 17 pages, one of which held new information for me
that I had not found before, the death and burial location of my
third great-grandparents and two of their children!
One of the things that I like about the Google search engine is that it saves a “cached” copy of the web pages it has found while exploring the internet. When I get a “page not found” error message, that page will
usually be available in the Google cache.
You can also focus searches on places. For instance,
Shinn “West Virginia”
produces about 3,340 pages. Unfortunately, a town in West Virginia bears the name “Shinnston” and, therefore, produces unrelated results. Most search engines have provisions for narrowing the results that are received. By modifying the search to
Shinn “West Virginia” -Shinnston
the result is trimmed slightly, down to about
3,190 pages. The “minus sign” is a signal to the search engine to ignore pages that have the word Shinnston in it.
Adding the name "Moses" gets the results down to 331 pages.
In looking at the results for the last search, a large number of the pages are genealogy or history related.
Results can be found for other types of topics as well. For instance a search of
Shinn obituaries
results in
2,510 pages, many of which have current and not so current obituaries.
Similar but slightly different searches can result in significantly different results. For instance,
Shinn obits
resulted in
534 pages, with completely different content than the previous one. Doing a search on
Shinn obit
seems like it should produce a result that is a combination of the previous 2 examples, but for whatever reason, it comes up with only
505 pages, which appear to be different from what was found on the others.
Searching for obituaries will result in finding a lot of pages that are not obituary pages. The reason for this is that many on-line newspapers have links to their section headings on each and every page and “obituaries” or “obits” is often one of these linked headings.
A search for
Shinn cemetery
came up with
4,040 pages Other examples for useful genealogy source searches might be words “deed” and “will.” Since both of those have meanings other than what is used in genealogy, the results should be expected to be mixed with non-genealogy pages. For a search of
Shinn deed
1,240 pages were found and a fairly good number of them appear to be genealogy related. On the other hand,
Shinn will
produced 15, 283 pages and a message that said "will" is a very common word and was ignored. This shows that some words that would
otherwise be very helpful, can’t be depended on because they are just too common. It says that the word “will” was ignored.
A similar search using
Shinn “last will and testament”
produced 112 pages. Some searches can produce surprising results. For example, one of my surnames that is connected to the Shinns is Lippincott. Initially, many people would not expect that that name would result in a lot of pages being found. However, about
7,030 pages for the Lippencott variation were found. When I corrected the spelling
331,000 pages were found just the surname was used. Part of the reason for this is that “Lippincott” is part of the name of a publishing company, so pages with citation for the publisher appear.
However, when I combine the two surnames that I have used here, better results should appear. In fact, with
Shinn Lippencott
there are
84 pages listed. With the corrected spelling,
Shinn Lippincott
1520 pages were found. Of these, I plan to revisit several again as they appeared to have useful information for me.
Naturally, additional search terms should be included to further
narrow the search. Combining a different surname with Shinn
Shinn Robey
produced
326 pages, while
Shinn Robey
narrowed it down to 38 of which I did not find any new
information. Words and phrases for topics can be useful, too. For instance, suppose you’ve heard that a set of books called the “DAR Patriot Index” has information on people who might have
fought in the Revolutionary War. Doing an initial lookup,
DAR
produces almost
8,850,000 pages with the top ones being for the Daughters of the
American Revolution.
patriot index
on the other hand, produces
285,000 pages, with the top one being a page for the White House.
Using parenthesis, on the other hand,
"patriot index"
results in 5,580 pages, with the same top result being the
White House. However, the third result is a link to a patriot
index lookup service by the Daughters of the American Revolution,
but all it has is
www.dar.org/cgi-bin/natsociety/pi_lookup.cfm. I saw "dar" and "pi_lookup,"
which I recognized, but most folks might not recognize them.
DAR
"patriot index"
further reduces the number of pages down to about
4,070, and results in several pages at the top related to DAR
patriot index lookups.
Oh-by-the-way note: In 1999,
when I first created this, we owned a set of the Patriot Index
that we had bought in a used bookstore for $30 and were doing
lookups in it. A year or so later, when we learned the DAR had
started doing lookups, we stopped and provided a link to them on
our old site along with a note saying that we were no longer
providing the lookup service. A few months ago we sold the
books on eBay for $150. Our old lookup page was the #3 site
on the last search example.
To bring this to a close, internet search engines use various methods for cataloguing and searching the internet. You will see different results in using other search engines, but the good ones have pages that explain how to improve your search results.
Hopefully, my example searches will have given you some ideas on how to use the search engines to find information that can help you.
Thanks for stopping by.
Completely revised 8/9/03
visits since 8/9/03
last updated
10/03/09 |
