Thursday, April 19, 2012

Mocavo The Search Engine for Genealogists

Disclosure: I was given a complementary Mocavo Plus subscription for review.


I've recently taken some time to explore Mocavo. The first thing I noticed...they have this blog indexed forward, backward and sideways!

My father's line is Baudermann and there are just not that many of them out there. Similar to other search engines, the first 3 to 4 pages of the Mocavo search results, for Baudermann, are my blog posts. It's always fun to see your blog posts show up, but I really would like some new material.

Mocavo Plus makes it easy to exclude my blog posts from the results. On the Advanced Search tab is a field to enter exclusions. I typed "Desperately Seeking" in the exclusion box and my blog posts were eliminated from the results. I chose not to type in my full blog name, as I was afraid putting the word "Surnames" in the exclusion box may eliminate some valid results.

Without using the exclusion box, Baudermann returned 886 search results. When I exclude Desperately Seeking I have 64 results.  I may have gone a little overboard in posting about this family! In addition to fewer links to review, I can tell their relevance immediately. I see website addresses for: Find A Grave, Ancestry.com, Genforum and Rootsweb...exactly the sources I am looking for. What a time saver! Mocavo is acting as my research assistant and "screening" my results, I like that.

Mocavo Plus also allows users to upload a GEDCOM to their site. The file can remain private (what's the point) or it can be made public and searchable. I will try this feature next. Maybe I will find there are more Baudermann's out there than what I think.

Thanks Mocavo!

3 comments:

  1. Jenna, your post prompted me to search Mocavo again for one of my surnames. One of the things I notice is that not only does it search post content, it also searches sidebar content. So, when one of my labels is "clothing" and I've written 8 posts that include the name I'm searching, all 8 appear on the results list as separate results. This means that some posts are being included multiple times. Some posts appear in the results list many times. Yes, I'd say Mocavo is thorough!

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