I recently saw an article in Family Tree Magazine that outlined some of the built in functions that Google provides to improve our research. After doing a little research of my own I found that many of the functions that Google provides are also available on many other search engines.
If you try these suggestions I'm sure that you will improve your search results. One thing you should try is adding places to your people searches. If you know an ancestor lived in New York or Boston, be sure to add that city to your name search you will reduce the number of results and ensure that you don't end up with an unrelated person from California.
So here's my take on using advanced search engine functions:
| Exact Match | ||
| Exclude | ||
| Spelling Variations | ||
| Include Common Words or #'s | ||
| Synonyms | ||
| Number Range Search |
The article mentioned several other genealogical websites that you might try as well. These search engines concentrate on family tree information and are likely to have more appropriate search results than the more general Google or MSN search engines. Some of the examples include: gensource.com/ifoundit and www.genealogy-search-help.com. Take a few minutes to look into these sites and try your new research techniques to see if you can find that elusive ancestor.
