Monday, June 12, 2006

WeRelate is a Genealogy oriented search engine - and more



Are you as tired as I am with Google returning more extraneous hits than good hits on your genealogy searches? There may be a better way - at www.WeRelate.org.

WeRelate is a free web search engine and wiki for genealogy sponsored by the Foundation for On-Line Genealogy, Inc., a non-profit (501c3) organization.

The site has three main components - a Search engine, a community to share data with, and a YouRelate section where you can post your own data.

I want to focus only on the Search capabilities, because I think it has real promise. The "Search" tab at the top leads you to a page with a search box and the opportunity to read three tutorials. The data included in the Search is:

Our aim is to provide a comprehensive search of genealogical information, both on-line and off-line.

Unlike a general-purpose search engine, we target only content that is relevant to genealogy for the index. We also index information about off-line microfilms, books, and microfiche found in sources such as the Family History Library Catalog. In addition, we make it easier to search the content by allowing you to include related personal names (nicknames, misspellings) and alternate place names (other names the places have been known by) in searches.

When I searched for my Benjamin Seaver, the search engine found the data on my www.genealogy.com page, data in the CVGS surname list pages (neither of which come up with Google or other general search engines), Rootsweb freepages, personal web pages, Rootsweb message boards, etc. In addition, it found items that were last name first and items with a word between the two names.

This search engine looks promising for genealogy searches - try it!

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