Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Mocavo Search Engine adds Blogs, more sites coming!

The www.Mocavo.com people have been busy adding websites to their genealogy-only search engine - read the press announcement at Mocavo.com Adds Thousands of New Sites to the World’s Largest Free Genealogy Search Engine, Including More Than 3000 Genealogy Blogs on the GeneaPress website.  I appreciate my blog being listed in the press release.

I tried some searches using the current site (my search terms are in [brackets]:

1) A search for ["isaac seaver"] gives me 467 matches, including many from my own blog, Genea-Musings.  That certainly helps any cousins find me on Mocavo! 

2)  ["isaac seaver" 1823] narrows the search to 263 matches - that's my guy.  The first release of Mocavo five weeks ago gave me only 56 matches for this search.

3)  ["isaac seaver" 1823 "lucretia smith"] narrows the search to 91 matches.

4)  But what if I want other mentions of Isaac Seaver, not my own blog posts?  I can use the "-" operator and search for ["isaac seaver" -geneamusings] and receive only 134 matches that are not my blog.  If I've already checked the Archive.org books with Isaac Seaver mentioned, then I could do a search for ["isaac seaver" -geneamusings -archive] and receive only 57 matches. 

Using search terms like a birth year, spouse's name or place name can help you narrow the matches to the ones you really want.  Using the operator "-" can help you eliminate certain websites from your search.

Like Google, this search engine uses many of the operators to help users narrow their searches down to the "wheat" instead of including all of the "chaff." 

Give www.Mocavo.com a try, but if you get too many matches try to narrow your search down by adding search terms specific to your target person, and then eliminate specific websites (like your own blog). 

I was curious about how many matches that Mocavo finds now for ["randy seaver"] - yikes!! 38,567 matches (a Google search shows only 22,200).  Too many to search through!  ["randy seaver" -geneamusings] gives me 29,983.  Still too many!  ["randy seaver" -geneamusings -genealogy] results in only 617. 

1 comment:

JL said...

Couldn't find any of the peeps on my site yet.