The Genealogy & Family History Social Network

SEARCH ENGINES

Search engines search the internet for the request, while websites can search what they have posted. Find-a-Grave is a site, Cyndi's List is a site, both of which have search features but only for their data. Archive.org and Google books both have search features but again only for what they have posted to their sites. Some of the search features allow “wild cards” which can prove useful.

Using various search engines for the internet will produce different results. Part of the reason is that some sites pay to have their sites appear first. For example for a google search type in “Smith genealogy” (use quotes) and you get about a half-dozen sites all with basically the same info, then type in “Brown genealogy”, again the same half-dozen sites will appear near or at the beginning. When you have the 3,000,000 sites appear fitting your search request then you can try to change the request by adding or subtracting items in your request.

However, another way is to use a different search engine which could bring up different sites you want (also try to change your request requirements).

While I tend to use Google, there are other search engines to try if you get a large number of hits on google and don't find anything in the first 10 pages. See the following (some are specialty search engines):

http://www.dogpile.com/

http://www.ask.com/?o=0&l=dir

http://www.bing.com/

https://www.yahoo.com/

https://www.mocavo.com/

http://www.zabasearch.com/index.php?se=&ref=

https://www.usa.gov/

https://archive.org/web/

http://www.academic-genealogy.com/topsearchenginesdirectories.htm

https://millionshort.com/

There are foreign search engines which may require you to know the language.