Friday, April 9, 2010

52 Weeks to Better Genealogy - Challenge 14

Week 14: Use a different search engine for your online genealogy research. Google is quite popular, but other search engines may provide different results. Try Yahoo! Search (http://search.yahoo.com/), Bing (http://www.bing.com/), Ask.com (http://www.ask.com/), Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com/), and even Clusty (http://clusty.com/). Pick an unusual surname and search it in different engines. Make note of the top 10 page returns for each.

This challenge most definitely IS a challenge. I am a Google lover through and through! I use Google to search, for my email, for my blog, for my reader...I think you get the picture here. However, in the true spirit of a Geneablogger I will give the others *shudder* a try. The test will be as suggested, pick an unusual surname and search for it. My Dad's family is the Baudermanns and they are few and far between in the US as well as in Germany. I will see if any of these search engines can give me something new *come on Google, don't let me down now*. I will use Baudermann as my search phrase and view the first ten pages of results from each site.

1. Yahoo: Nothing new, a lot of sites in German, my blog showed up three times as well as some of my queries on message boards.

2. Bing: No new information, Bing did return more sites in German than Yahoo did. I did like the fact that Bing's translation service put the English and German versions side by site.

3. Ask: Sadly, no new information to report. Ask did return some Historical NY Times articles, which I already had, but Yahoo and Bing did not in the first ten pages.

4. Dogpile: Dogpile is the compilation of Goole, Bing, Yahoo and Ask but only returned three pages of results, none of which were new.

5. Clusty: Clusty is a new search engine to me, I've not used this before so I'm hoping for positive results. I like the fact that related search results come back clustered together, that's a new approach. Clusty is also the first to return some of my very own tweets containing the Baudermann name. While Clusty does not appear to have any new information for me, I did spend more time with it simply because it's arrangement of the information caught my attention. I must also admit, I looked past the first ten pages of results.

I liked this challenge, as designed, I traveled off the beaten path in search of information.

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