Short Google Tip

One of the advantages of using Google for genealogy research is its flexibility. Let's say you're looking for an ancestor who lived iin Albany, NY and then in Boston, MA. You also think they may have moved to Chicago at some point. In most search engines,this involves 3 separate searches: John Smith, Albany, New York; John Smith, Boston, Massachusetts; John Smith, Chicago, Illinois.

We talked in a previous post about the drop down menu that allows a single search in adjacent counties or states. That's obviously not going to work here as these 3 locations are far removed from one another.

So, what can you do? First, remember that you want to catch ALL the people named John Smith with any possible middle name or initial. We'll begin with "John * Smith".

Next in the string, we want to tell Google that we only want results that are pertinent to genealogy. Now our string looks like this:
"John * Smith" ~genealogy.

To narrow this search down to limit the results that mention Albany, Boston or Chicago, we don't have to do three individual searches and bounce back and forth between three different sets of results. That's where the operator "OR" comes in. Use "OR" in capital letters....that's important because that's what tells Google that you're looking for variable results. Your returns should include pages that includes those words: John [with anything in the middle but attached] Smith, related to genealogy and located in any of the three locations we indicated in the search string:

"John * Smith" ~genealogy +Boston OR Albany OR Chicago

Note that there is a "+" operator just before the three cities which touches the first word. But all the remaining words are separated by a single space.

Here's a list of results based on building this search:

John Smith (no quotation marks) 227,000,000 results

"John Smith" 22,600,000 (10% of original search)

"John * Smith" 7,160,000,000 (MUCH more because anything can occur between JOHN and SMITH...we haven't added ~genealogy yet)

"John * Smith" ~genealogy 203,000,000 results

"John * Smith" ~ genealogy +Boston OR Chicago OR Albany 135,000,000

Lots of different results! I suppose using a name like "John Smith" returns an enormous number of results simply because of the commonality of the name. If your ancestor is Abiah Makepeace (my 3rd cousin 8X removed), the results would, of course, be substantially smaller. I used the common name "John Smith" simply to better illustrate how dramatically the numbers can change. Note that when using "John * Smith", somewhere in the results you'll get a web page that contains the following line:

John Adams and his wife Abigail Smith

The first word is "JOHN" and the last word is "SMITH". We will get that returned in our results simply because Google did what we asked it to do. It found the word "JOHN" and the word "SMITH" and since the "*" was there, it didn't matter what was in the middle. To eliminate "Abigail," you could put -Abigail somewhere in your string.

Remember searching is not a SCIENCE, where 2 + 2 is always 4. It has to be...that's the science of mathematics. If "4" wasn't the answer, there'd be anarchy! Imagine what else could go wrong!!!

Searching can be better described as an ART. You modify, add, remove, edit and try, try, try until you get your results trimmed down to what you began looking for. And hopefully without eliminating results you want!

Good luck in your searching....more Google hints coming...

Visit Old Bones Genealogy and Family Research of New England at www.oldbones.co and remember to share the blog or tweet the blog or reblog the blog....Whatever it is that works toward spreading it around!! And if you do, thanks!