Search Engines: a few tricks!

I honestly saw this on USENET in the Irish Genealogy forum. So I thought I'd address the topic here. Search engines are maddening if you haven't figured them out. You know them, Yahoo, AltaVista, Hotbot, MSN and a host of others. Most people find them impossible. All that searching and looking for hours on end just to find what you want and sometimes you never find what you want. Try using Google Most people haven't heard of it but it's the best search engine out there in my opinion. I always find what I'm looking for within the first three pages. Also good is Dogpile. I have had interesting hits there.

Okay so you just went to Google and you are baffled by the hits you get by typing in Irish Genealogy. Let's try what I did today. I typed in "irish town names" and found that I got a lot of links that didn't apply. Next I typed in "irish town names ireland". The mother load of Irish Town topics! The amazing links I found have been added to the links section.

Now let's say you wanted to look up sites for an Irish song that you remember from childhood but you don't know the title. How would you do it? I bet you'd sit there and look through every single Irish Folk Song site that you could find and read through the lyrics? That's the hard way. The easy way is to type in the lyrics you remember. Example: "she stole my comb irish music lyrics". Success!!

How about you have a few words in Irish on an old letter that you don't understand. Let's try "Dia dhuit". Now enter in the search box "dia dhuit irish language". You'll get your answer in one fell swoop!

If you don't get the sites you want in the first few pages tack on some more words for the engine to find. Let's say you tried the name O'Connell you got a million businesses and homepage sites. All you need to do is type in, "o'connell genealogy ireland irish families history". If that's not enough tack on "database search". The more key words you give in the search base - the more you narrow down the hits you get. The search engine normally gives you the sites that meet all the key words first and then lists them in decending order.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic