Slides from a talk given at the National Genealogical Society Family History Conference, Raleigh, NC, May 11th, 2017 - Session T218. Shared for personal use only. No use approved for non-profit or for-profit organizations.

1. NGS FAMILY HISTORY CONFERENCE
Raleigh, North Carolina, 2017
Session T-218, Syllabus, p. 169
JORDAN JONES
E -mail : jordan@genealogymedia.com
Web: genealogymedia.com
Twitter: @genealogymedia

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session at NGS, is a violation of the speaker’s copyright.
oIn any case, I will post all of my slides at
www.genealogymedia.com/talks

3. 1. Access: Navigation and Search
2. How Do Search Engines Work?
3. Genealogical Searching
4. Basic Searches
5. Advanced Searches
6. Special Google Search Features
7. Methodologies
8. A Search Example: Jane Graham

5. Access is “The availability of or permission
to use records.”
— Archives & Records Management Handbook,
Oregon State U.,
http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/archives/handboo
k/definitions/

6. For web sites, access similarly describes
the permission and ability for people to
“identify, locate, and use information.”

7. The number of public web pages
quadrupled between 2005 (11.5 billion) and
2017 (47 billion).
One needs powerful search skills to find
relevant genealogical data.

8. o Navigation — Clicking through a pre-
defined path in a website to find the
information you need.
o Search — Helpful if you do not know
how to navigate to the information, or if
the site is designed for search, and
maybe has limited navigation available.

9. A good web designer will focus on
improving customer access to information
through both paths (search and
navigation).
However, some databases do not lend
themselves to navigation.

11. 1. Gather
The search engine has computer
programs “crawl” the web, gathering all
the pages. Limited by:
• Login or Navigation Requirements
• Site Owner Requests for Inclusion or
Exclusion

12. 2. Organize
The search engine creates and manages
an index of all the words found on the
pages crawled
3. Cache
Some web search applications (such as
Google) store (cache) all the pages they
crawl

13. 4. Rank
Links are ranked in terms of relevance,
popularity, authoritativeness and other
criteria: The Secret Sauce.
5. Search
All the previous steps are in service of
helping you find content.

14. Gather
(Crawl)
Organize
(Index)
Cache
(Store)
Rank
Search

16. 1. Keyword
Every significant word is part of the
search. “Every word searchable.” This is
mainly what you go to Google for.
2. Database
Words are searched against particular
fields in a database, such as “surname”
or “state.” This is how most genealogy
sites are organized.

18. Jane Graham
Google: [ Jane Graham ]

19. To include common words or to ignore
plurals and synonyms and search for a term
exactly as you typed it, preface the term with
a + sign.
Google: [ Jane Graham +barn ]

20. The exact phrase “Jane Graham”.
Google: [ “Jane Graham” ]
will find only pages with the exact phrase
“Jane Graham” and ignore pages that only
have phrases such as “Jane Eliza Graham”

21. “Jane” is near “Graham”.
Google: [ Jane * Graham OR Graham * Jane
]
will find “Jane Eliza Graham”, “Jane ‘Liza’
Eliza Graham”, and “Graham, Miss Jane”
but not “Jane Graham” or “Graham, Jane”

22. AND / OR
Google: [ “Jane Graham” OR “Graham, Jane”
]
This allows you to find something in spite of
the alternate ways something may be listed.
It is very handy for first-name last and last-
name first searches or searches with names
and nicknames.

24. Find pages with words like your search
term or phrase.
(More useful outside genealogy, but has
some similarity to a Soundex search.)
Google: A search for [ ~genealogy ] returns
results about genealogy and family history.

25. Some sites allow wildcards (*_?) to replace
one or more characters. Check the site’s
guidelines.
These are very handy for checking for
occurrences of variably-spelled surnames.

26. o ? replaces one character
o * replaces zero to five characters.
o Names must contain at least three non-
wildcard characters.
o To search for Janson OR Johnson OR
Jensen OR Johannsen, you could type
J*ns?n

27. Janson
Jennsen

28. o * replaces one or two whole words.
o There is no wild card for less than a word
on Google.
o For multiple surname spelling searches
on Google, you would use the Boolean OR
operator [ Johnson OR Jensen OR
Johannsen ]

30. Find pages that do not include a particular
word.
Google: [ Jane Graham -Eliza ]

31. Find pages that do not include a particular
phrase.
Google: [ Jane -“Eliza Graham” ]

32. Find pages in a specific site, such as
usgenweb.org, where ...
Google: [ site:www.usgenweb.org Graham ]

33. Find pages, but exclude a specific site.
Google: [ -site:www.usgenweb.org Graham ]
Useful when you already know what’s at one
site, and it is coming up prominently in your
searches.

34. City, County, State or Other Locale can
narrow search results drastically.
Google: [ “Jane Graham” “Monroe County” ]
Keep in mind that this is only a keyword
search on Google. It does not understang
you are talking about a place.
Major genealogy sites, Flickr and other
database searches provide fields to narrow
searches by location.

35. Birth Certificate, Obituary, Newspaper
Google: [ “Jane Graham” newspaper ]
Major genealogy sites provide methods for
limiting searches to particular record types
based on database searches.
Google does not know what a newspaper is,
but it sees the word “newspaper” in the site,
or in links to it.

36. Google databases are databases for
particular records or kinds of information
Google: Image Search, Map Search
Major genealogy sites provide tools for
limiting searches to specific databases or
groups of related tags or descriptors.

37. Soundex, available on many genealogy
websites, and not only for census records.
Find pages with words like your search
term or phrase. (More useful outside
genealogy, but has some similarity to a
Soundex search.)
Google: A search for [ ~genealogy ] returns
results about genealogy and family history.

39. Google Instant is Google’s predictive search.
Based on what you have searched for and
what others have search for, it suggests
searches you might want to run.

43. Searches recent pages.
Google has recently hidden this under the
Tools menu.
This is handy for looking at pages crawled
since you last ran a search.

44. Stephen Morse points out that Google is
really tracking when Google indexed a
page, not when the page was last modified.
Probably a better search for the age of a
web page is Stephen Morse’s:
http://stevemorse.org/google/googledate.ht
ml

45. Narrow your search to images (including
images of documents), video, blogs, voice
(for voicemail in Google Voice), news
(including recent obituaries), books, social
media.
See also GoogleMaps, which has taken over
from Google’s searchable map and image
mashup, Panoramio.

48. Google Ngrams tracks the currency of words
in the millions titles in Google Books. It’s
handy to understand when words became
popular or passé.
https://books.google.com/ngrams

50. Google Shopping can be used for quick
comparison pricing for that next scanner

51. @ – Search social media, such as @Twitter
or @Facebook.

52. Plan Your Path to
Achieve Predictable Results

53. a) Read the search tips.
b) Look for advanced search pages.
c) Experiment! Make your search more
specific to narrow it. Make your search
more general to widen it.
d) Map out strategies for more specific or
varied searches.
e) Automate search results into your inbox
with Google Alerts.

54. Yahoo. help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/
Google.
www.google.com/support/websearch/
Bing. https://help.bing.microsoft.com
Ancestry. https://support.ancestry.com/s/
click “Search and Records.”

55. Fold3 Advanced Search Page.
https://www.fold3.com/s.php and click
“Advanced.”
GenealogyBank Advanced Techniques.
http://www.genealogybank.com/informatio
n/help/advanced-techniques
Google Advanced Search.
http://www.google.com/advanced_search
(under the Settings menu)

60. What do you want to know?
How close do your search results get you?
What might you subtract (if you have too
many results) or add (if you have too
few)?

61. Learn from your searches and build on
them.
Note what works in some cases, and see
where else you might apply it.
Keep a “search log” just as you keep a
“research log”

62. You can have Google search in the
background and send results on a regular
basis:
www.google.com/alerts/

63. Get results when Google finds them (“as-it-
happens”), daily or weekly
Select “All” or “Only the best” results
Choose to receive your results
in your e-mail, or via an RSS feed

66. oFacts: Jane Graham, was born in 1811
and died unmarried in 1854.
She lived her life in Monroe County, VA
(now WV).
oQ: How do I find her?
oA: By adjusting the specificity of the
search.

73. By creating a more specific search, we
narrowed the results
from nearly 51 million
to 7,
or by a factor of almost 7.3 million!

74. Jordan Jones
E-mail: jordan@genealogymedia.com
Twitter: @genealogymedia.com
These slides, and the syllabus, are available at:
http://www.genealogymedia.com/talks/