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

2. 1 Oct 2011 VT-French Canadian Genealogy Society Key Elements of the Search Page 267 1 3 2 1.Google Search Box 2.Signin to Google account, search settings, advanced options 3.Options to search only specific content (maps, images, news, etc)

3. 1 Oct 2011 VT-French Canadian Genealogy Society 3 4 2 5 1 1 6 1.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

4. 1 Oct 2011 VT-French Canadian Genealogy Society Google Search Operators & Commands

5. 1 Oct 2011 VT-French Canadian Genealogy Society Effects of Refining Search Keyworks, Operators & Commands

6. 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:www.familysearch.org; site:www.immigrantships.net “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