Microelectronics Ed McGuire VT-FCGS Google Your Genealogy Tips and techniques to help find your ancestors

1 Oct 2011 VT-French Canadian Genealogy Society Key Elements of the Search Page Google Search Box 2.Signin to Google account, search settings, advanced options 3.Options to search only specific content (maps, images, news, etc)

1 Oct 2011 VT-French Canadian Genealogy Society Google ads 2.Results – Website title, website address (URL), initial lines of content w/ search terms highlighted 3.Advice that this site has more content that’s currently not shown 4.Search statistics 5.Options to limit search results to specific content 6.Additional tools (find related sites, view w/ a timeline, pick a timeframe, etc) Key Elements of the Results Page

1 Oct 2011 VT-French Canadian Genealogy Society Google Search Operators & Commands

1 Oct 2011 VT-French Canadian Genealogy Society Effects of Refining Search Keyworks, Operators & Commands

1 Oct 2011 VT-French Canadian Genealogy Society 1.Start with broad searches (few keywords) and then narrow them (add keywords & operators) 2.Upper case/lower case doesn’t matter (except for OR, AND and AROUND) 3.The first search terms should be most important Keywords 4.WWW = Who…Where…When 5.If useless topics are clogging results (eg. searching John Hilton)…use “-” (-paris hilton) 6.Stemming - died also returns die (metal die, chip die,), dies, use +died or “died” to be exact 7.If you know what you seek is a Word (.doc) or PDF file use “filetype” (e.g.- filetype: pdf) 8.“Stop Words” including - of, the, and, they, is, etc - are sometimes ignored. Example: results for: “the land of the free” [7M results] and: land of the free [150M] To search for a phrase and include Stop Words use quotes “the land of the free” 9.When finding too much content try targeting your searches Look in: News or Blog or Group, instead of default of “web” which looks at all of them Try site: site: “ernest flagg” Try specific URL extenstions, site:gov, site:edu, site:co.uk (England) Try document formats, filetype:pdf, filetype:doc, filetype:ged (for GEDCOM) 10.Keep a record of all successful results – what URL, what search term used, what date 11.Keep a record by individual of all unsuccessful searches already done (don’t keep repeating) 12.Try Google Alerts for those Brickwalls in case something new pops up (…it will eventually) A Dozen Tips for Better Searches