Dear Sherwoods and Kin, Search engines are our online super-librarian, and it helps to know how to unleash their amazing search capabilities. I thought I'd pass on a few tips on how to increase the likelihood of finding your Sherwood ancestors through the use of search engines. Some of this information will be old hat to many of you, but some of you may find it useful. 1. One of the easiest means to narrow down your search and eliminate a lot of search engine "noise" (useless links) is to enclose your search phrase in double-quotes. For example, if you are searching for Anson Sherwood, type in "Anson Sherwood", with the quotes. This guarantees that you will only get webpages that contain the exact phrase "Anson Sherwood" (minus the quotes, of course; search engines understand that the quotes are not part of the search phrase, but only mean that you want it to find that phrase exactly as it appears inside the quotes). The shortcoming of this search method is that results of your search will not include pages that have, say, "Anson G. Sherwood". But using quotes is still a powerful tool. If you don't use quotes, the search engine will list every page that has both "Anson" and "Sherwood" on the same page, but not necessarily together. For example, you may get a link to a page that has a list of names, like: "Anson Anderson, Mark Murphy, Zedediah Sherwood". The page satisfies your loose search criteria because it contains both "Anson" and "Sherwood." 2. Another powerful search is to enter the name as follows: "Sherwood, Anson" (carefully note the order: surname comma space given name). This is a great search to use because names often appear this way in online census indices and other online records. Search method #1, above, will not capture the webpages that this search will capture. You will be surprised at how many additional pages you will get with this method. You can easily double your results by using both search methods. For example, here are some test cases using methods #1 and #2, using several different search engines: Search Phrase Search Engine Pages Found "Anson Sherwood" www.google.com 15 "Sherwood, Anson" www.google.com 22 "Harold Sherwood" www.google.com 72 "Sherwood, Harold" www.google.com 71 "Anson Sherwood" www.yahoo.com 3 "Sherwood, Anson" www.yahoo.com 8 "Harold Sherwood" www.yahoo.com 27 "Sherwood, Harold" www.yahoo.com 38 "Anson Sherwood" www.altavista.com 8 "Sherwood, Anson" www.altavista.com 6 "Harold Sherwood" www.altavista.com 16 "Sherwood, Harold" www.altavista.com 27 You can see why I am partial to Google. 3. Here's a really neat trick to use when you are searching for someone with a relatively common name, like "Benjamin Sherwood." Google found 225 pages for that name when I searched for it in quotes. I don't want to wade through all of those pages, so suppose I know his spouse's name, or I want to verify that he was married to an "Ann Anderson." If I just type Benjamin Sherwood Ann Anderson without quotes, I get 13,000 pages. Useless. If I type "Benjamin Sherwood" Ann Anderson (Benjamin Sherwood in quotes, no quotes around Ann Anderson), I get 40 pages. Not bad, but there's a better way yet. Type "Benjamin Sherwood" "Ann Anderson" (both names in quotes with a space between). Now I get only 3 pages, but every one of them has exactly the Benjamin Sherwood and wife, Ann Anderson, that I was looking for. 4. You may or may not be able to replicate the three searches above by using Boolean logic, which most if not all search engines understand. That is the straightforward logic which uses operators like "and", "or" and "near" to fine tune your search. They can be useful, but I'm a lazy son of a gun, and I don't want to waste precious seconds going to the search engine's "Advanced Search" page in order to use the Boolean operators. I want to do it all on the main page, quick and easy. If you're willing to experiment a little bit, you may find even better ways to find what you're looking for on the main search page. 5. Recognize the shortcomings of search engines. As far as I know, no internet-wide search engine, like those I've shown above, can index PDF documents. This is an ENORMOUS shortcoming, but fortunately, this shortcoming seems to inexorably, albeit slowly, coming to an end. The greatest obstacle to making genealogical information available online is the time and manpower it takes to transcribe zillions of census records, books, journals, correspondence, and other documents. The only rational approach is to make them available as online graphical images, i.e., scan them and save them online as PDF files or some other graphical image format. Once the techno-gurus figure out how to make these graphical documents searchable by the 800-pound-gorilla search engines, there will be an explosion of genealogical data on the internet. To get a taste of what it's like to be able to search within a scanned document, check out the online "Making of America" project sponsored by Cornell University and the Univ. of Michigan http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/ They have scanned an astounding 8,500 books and 50,000 journal articles. Each scanned image has been enhanced with "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR) to facilitate searching and accessing the texts. I have only scratched the surface of the Cornell site, but because 19th century New York state history is one of its strong suits, there are more Sherwoods in there than you can shake a stick at. Keep in mind that you cannot search these documents from OUTSIDE the Cornell Univ. and Univ. of Michigan websites. That is what I mean when I say that this particular search technology is not currently in use internet-wide. You can only search the OCR-enhanced scanned documents from within the Cornell and UMich sites. That was the last I knew, anyway. If the situation has changed, please let me know. I hope this helps a bit. Kind Regards, Geoff Geoffrey Sherwood Towaco, NJ, USA ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/.