Each of you may know all these already, but I learned a lot from this post, which was posted to another list I am a member of. Being that most of us use the search engines much of the time, I thought this would be good to share with all of our members. Wyndell Taylor List Manger >SEARCH ENGINE TIPS >by Mike Jarvis > >As genealogists in today's high-tech world, the importance of using search >engines properly is ever increasing. With genealogy related web sites making >up a huge part of our World Wide Web, we would like to share some search >engine tips that perhaps a few you will find helpful. There is much that >could be written about this, but we will focus only on a few tips that we >find most helpful. We use [ and ] to indicate terms that would be written in >a search box. > >First - The use of quotation marks. When using a combination of words in the >search box, the search engine results will include every web page where >these words occur anywhere on that page regardless of whether these words >are immediately next to each other. Using the search term of [family >history ] will result in 109,000,000 hits while ["family history"] within >quotations will result in 5,400,000 hits. This is because in the second >instance it is only finding pages were the words are actually next to or >immediately touching each other. Try this with a family name. For example my >grandmother is named Flora MacDonald. If I search [Flora McDonald ] in >Google it returns 251,000 hits. Putting ["Flora MacDonald"] in quotations >results in 29,600 hits. This is far too many hits and primarily relate to a >prominent woman in Scottish and American history. This is not my >grandmother. However, knowing that my grandmothers middle name was Hermosa, >it makes sense to put ["Flora Hermosa MacDonald"] in the search box and I >get two hits related specifically to my grandmother. Success! > >Second - The use of the minus sign. This is my second favorite search tip. >Using any combination of words in a search box with the minus sign directly >next to a word that you DO NOT want to find is also helpful. Using the >search term ["Flora MacDonald" -Scotland -Scottish -"North Carolina" -NC ] >will eliminate any pages from my search that includes the words next to the >minus sign. So I will get only those pages that have my grandmother's name >and do not have Scotland or North Carolina on the site. This effectively >reduces the number of sites by more than half, from 29,600 to 12,800 hits. >Using quotation marks and the minus sign in combination greatly improves >your search results. > >Third - The use of the plus sign. The plus sign has the effect of >instructing the search engine to give special emphasis to any word where the >plus sign is against it. My grandmother's father was Alexander MacDonald. >However, not the Alexander MacDonald who was prime minister of Canada. Using >the search term [Flora MacDonald -Scotland -Scottish -"North Carolina" -NC >+"Alexander MacDonald" -Canada ] gives me 1 hit that directs me to a site >about my grandmother. Here we have combined quotation marks with the minus >sign and the plus sign > >Fourth - The site search. Let's say that I would like to find Alexander >MacDonald, however, I only want to search a particular domain. I would >simply use the search phrase ["Alexander MacDonald" site:rootsweb.com ]. >Rather than thousands of hits I get 204. Similarly, you could put a minus >sign in front of rootsweb.com so that it searches all domains except >Rootsweb. > >Fifth - The intitle search term. Suppose that you would like to find every >site on the Web with the word genealogy in the title. The search box would >need the term [intitle:genealogy ], which would result in 943,000 hits. >Similarly, use the term [intitle:genealogy -site:ancestry.com ] and you >eliminate 3000