25 Google Power Search Tips for Genealogists

Google is the search engine of choice for most genealogists due to its ability to return relevant search results for genealogy and surname queries and its huge index. Google is much more than just a tool for finding Web sites, however, and most people surfing for information on their ancestors barely scratch the surface of its full potential. If you know what you are doing, you can use Google to search within Web sites, locate photos of your ancestors, bring back dead sites, and track down missing relatives. Learn how to Google as youve never Googled before. Begin With the Basics 1. All Terms Count: Google automatically assumes an implied AND between each of your search terms. In other words, a basic search will only return pages that include all of your search terms. 2. Use Lower Case: Google is case insensitive, with the exception of the search operators AND and OR. All other search terms will return the same results, regardless of the combination of upper and lower case letters used in your search query. Google also ignores most common punctuation such as commas and periods. Thus a search for Archibald Powell Bristol, England will return the same results as archibald powell bristol england. 3. Search Order Matters: Google will return results that contain all of your search terms, but will give higher priority to the earlier terms in your query. Thus, a search for power wisconsin cemetery will return pages in a different ranked order than wisconsin power cemetery. Put your most important term first, and group your search terms in a way that makes sense. Search With a Focus 4. Search for a Phrase: Use quotation marks around any two word or greater phrase to find results where the words appear together exactly as you have entered them. This is especially useful when searching for proper names (i.e. a search for thomas jefferson will bring up pages with thomas smith and bill jefferson, while searching for thomas jefferson will only bring up pages with the name thomas jefferson included as a phrase. 5. Exclude Unwanted Results: Use a minus sign (-) before words that you want to be excluded from the search. This is especially useful when searching for a surname with a common usage such as rice or one which is shared with a famous celebrity such as Harrison Ford. Search for ford -harrison to exclude results with the word harrison. It also works well for cities that exist in more than one area such as shealy lexington south carolina OR sc -massachusetts -kentucky -virginia. You have to be careful when eliminating terms (especially place names), however, because this will exclude pages that have results including both your preferred location and the ones you eliminated. 6. Use OR to Combine Searches: Use the term OR between search terms to retrieve search results that match any one of a number of words. The default operation for Google is to return results that match ALL search terms, so by linking your terms with OR (note that you have to type OR in ALL CAPS) you can achieve a bit more flexibility (e.g. smith cemetery OR gravestone will return results for smith cemetery and smith gravestone). 7. Exactly What You Want: Google employs a number of algorithms to ensure accurate search results, including automatically considering searches for words that are common synonyms to be identical, or suggesting an alternate, more common spellings. A similar algorithm, called stemming, returns not only results with your keyword, but also with terms based on the keyword stem — such as powers, power and powered. Sometimes Google can be a little too helpful, however, and will return results for a synonym or word that you may not want. In these cases, use quotation marks around your search term to ensure that it is used exactly as you typed it (e.g. power surname genealogy) 8. Force Additional Synonyms: Although Google search automatically displays results for certain synonyms, the tilde symbol (~) will force Google to show additional synonyms (and related words) for your query. For example, a search for schellenberger ~vital records leads Google to return results including vital records, birth records, marriage records, and more. Similarly, ~obituaries will also include obits, death notices, newspaper obituaries, funeral, etc. Even a search for schellenberger ~genealogy will yield different search results than schellenberger genealogy. Search terms (including synonyms) are bolded in Google search results, so you can easily see what terms were found on each page. 9. Fill in the Blanks: Including an *, or wildcard, in your search query tells Google to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches. Use the wildcard (*) operator to end a question or phrase such as ​william crisp was born in * or as a proximity search to find terms located within two words of each other such as david * norton (good for middle names and initials). Note that the * operator works only on whole words, not parts of words. You cant, for example, search for owen* in Google to return results for Owen and Owens. 10. Use Googles Advanced Search Form: If the search options above are more than you want to know, try using Googles Advanced Search Form which simplifies most of the search options previously mentioned, such as using search phrases, as well as removing words you dont want to be included in your search results. Search Suggested Alternate Spellings Google has become one smart cookie and now suggests alternate spellings for search terms that appear to be misspelled. The search engines self-learning algorithm automatically detects misspellings and suggests corrections based on the most popular spelling of the word. You can get a basic idea of how it works by typing in geneology as a search term. While Google will return search results for pages on geneology, it will also ask you Did you mean genealogy? Click on the suggested alternate spelling for a whole new list of sites to browse! This feature comes in particularly handy when searching for cities and towns for which you arent sure of the correct spelling. Type in Bremehaven and Google will ask you if you meant Bremerhaven. Or type in Napels Italy, and Google will ask you if you meant Naples Italy. Watch out, however! Sometimes Google chooses to display the search results for the alternate spelling and youll need to select the correct spelling to find what you are really lookin g for. Bring Back Sites From the Dead How many times have you found what looks to be a very promising Web site, only to get a File Not Found error when clicking on the link? Genealogical Web sites seem to come and go every day as webmasters change file names, switch ISPs, or just decide to remove the site because they can no longer afford to maintain it. This doesnt mean the information is always gone forever, however. Hit the Back button and look for a link to a cached copy at the end of the Google description and page URL. Clicking on the cached link should bring up a copy of the page as it appeared at the time that Google indexed that page, with your search terms highlighted in yellow. You can also return Googles cached copy of a page, by preceding the pages URL with cache:. If you follow the URL with a space-separated list of search words, they will be highlighted on the returned page. For example,  cache:genealogy.about.com surname  will return the cached version of this sites homepage with the term surname high lighted in yellow. Find Related Sites Found a site that you really like and want more? GoogleScout can help you find sites with similar content. Hit the Back button to return to your Google search results page and then click on the  Similar Pages  link. This will take you to a new page of search results with links to pages that contain similar content. The more specialized pages (such as a page for a specific surname) may not turn up many relevant results, but if you are researching a particular topic (i.e. adoption or immigration), GoogleScout can help you find a large number of resources very quickly, without having to worry about selecting the right keywords. You can also access this feature directly by using the related command with the URL of the site that you like (related:genealogy.about.com). Follow the Trail Once youve found a valuable site, chances are that some of the sites which link to it may also be beneficial to you. Use the  link  command along with a URL to find pages that contain links pointing to that URL. Enter  link:familysearch.org  and youll find about 3,340 pages which link to the homepage of familysearch.org. You can also use this technique to find out who, if anyone, has linked to your personal genealogy site. Search Within a Site While many major sites have search boxes, this isnt always true of smaller, personal genealogy sites. Google comes to the rescue again, however, by allowing you to restrict search results to a specific site. Just enter your search term followed by the  site  command and the main URL for the site you wish to search in the Google search box on the main Google page. For example,  military site:www.familytreemagazine.com  pulls up 1600 pages with the search term  military  on the Family Tree Magazine Web site. This trick is especially useful for quickly finding surname information on genealogy sites without indexes or search capabilities. Cover Your Bases When you really want to make sure you havent missed a good genealogy site, enter  allinurl:genealogy  to return a list of sites with  genealogy  as part of their URL (can you believe that Google found more than 10 million?). As you can tell from this example, this is a better option to use for more focused searches, such as surnames or locality searches. You can combine multiple search terms, or use other operators such as OR to help focus your search (i.e.  allinurl:genealogy france  OR  french). A similar command is also available to search for terms contained within a title (i.e.  allintitle:genealogy france  OR  french). Find People, Maps and More If youre searching for U.S. information, Google can do so much more than just search Web pages. The lookup information they provide through their search box has been expanded to include street maps, street addresses, and phone numbers. Enter a first and last name, city, and state to find a phone number. You can also do a reverse lookup by entering a phone number to find a street address. To use Google to find street maps, just enter a street address, city, and state (i.e.  8601 Adelphi Road College Park MD), in the Google search box. You can also find business listings by entering the name of a business and its location or zip code (i.e.  tgn.com utah). Pictures From the Past Googles image search feature makes it easy to locate photos on the Web. Just click on the Images tab on Googles home page and type in a keyword or two to view a results page full of image thumbnails. To find photos of specific people try putting their first and last names within quotes (i.e.  laura ingalls wilder). If youve got a bit more time or a more unusual surname, then just entering the surname should be enough. This feature is also a great way to find photos of old buildings, tombstones, and even your ancestors hometown. Because Google doesnt crawl for images as often as it does for Web pages, you may find many pages/images have moved. If the page doesnt come up when you click on the thumbnail, then you may be able to find it by copying the URL from below the feature, pasting it into the Google search box, and using the cache feature. Glancing Through Google Groups If youve got a bit of time on your hands, then check out the Google Groups search tab available from the Google homepage. Find info on your surname, or learn from the questions of others by searching through an archive of over 700 million Usenet newsgroup messages going back as far as 1981. If youve got even more time on your hands, then check out this  historical Usenet timeline  for a fascinating diversion. Narrow Your Search by File Type Typically when you search the Web for information, you expect to pull up traditional Web pages in the form of HTML files. Google offers results in a variety of different formats, however, including .PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format), .DOC (Microsoft Word), .PS (Adobe Postscript), and .XLS (Microsoft Excel). These files appear among your regular search results listings where you can either view them in their original format, or use the  View as HTML  link (good for when you dont have the application that is needed for that particular file type, or for when computer viruses are a concern). You can also use the filetype command to narrow your search to find documents in particular formats (i.e. filetype:xls genealogy forms). If youre someone who uses Google quite a bit, then you may want to consider downloading and using the Google Toolbar (requires Internet Explorer Version 5 or later and Microsoft Windows 95 or later). When the Google Toolbar is installed, it automatically appears along with the Internet Explorer toolbar and makes it easy to use Google to search from any Web site location, without returning to the Google home page to begin another search. A variety of buttons and a drop-down menu make it easy to perform all of the searches described in this article with just a click or two.