Google!

[Emma]

Always worth "googling" a family name - recently did this while helping a friend and it brought up an extensive website which extracted everyone with that surname from every census and had similar baptism, marriage and burial entries from the parish records of the original home parish dating from 1553 until registration began. Also included family trees and records of family members overseas. It was very impressive!

 

[Tim]

I also use this search facility on Google. It searches for the names in reverse order and/or with other names that you enter.

Ancestors Search

 

[Liberty]

Always worth "googling" a family name - recently did this while helping a friend and it brought up an extensive website which extracted everyone with that surname from every census and had similar baptism, marriage and burial entries from the parish records of the original home parish dating from 1553 until registration began. Also included family trees and records of family members overseas. It was very impressive!

Umm - depends on the family name. I am grateful that some of my ancestors were called Strangleman and Twizell, but despair of the Wests and Coopers

 

[Alexander Bisset]

Tim - add an article on using Google's advanced search to your list of things we should put together please. I'm always surprised at the number of people who haven't even heard that you can use extra symbols in a Google Search to restrict the search to more meaningful items. I'm also a firm advocate these days of using Google Image Search. It's interesting for instance how many people on the forum have used their profile picture on other sites. Learning about such things makes people more aware of their privacy options.

 

[Tim]

Tim - add an article on using Google's advanced search to your list of things we should put together please.

Done now at rev01

 

[Tim]

Some Advance Google Search Techniques.

Have you ever tried putting your own name into Google just to see what results you get? Go on, try it and then you can use the tips below to help narrow in on you. For this example I'm going to search for Victor Gaby. 5,580,000 hits - wow.
This is because it has searched for all Victors and all Gabys.

There are a number of operators (symbols) that you can add to your search to limit the results you get.

The first one we can try is the quote marks ", (shift+2). Add this before and after the name, so lets now try "Victor Gaby". By adding the quote marks you're asking Google to look for that phrase. That's better, down to 13,100 hits, but still a bit too many to trawl through.

The next thing we could is try using the minus sign -, this means to exclude a word from your search results. So we know that Victor didn't have a Facebook account, so lets now try "Victor Gaby" -facebook Better, 10,300 hits.
You can multiple minus signs, so lets get rid of twitter, so lets try "Victor Gaby" -facebook -twitter Bit better, 9,950

This is the principle of these operators. Other operators that can be used
~ Adding this (called a tilde) in front of the word will search for similar words, e.g. if you searched for ~food facts you would also get results from nutritional facts.

To search pages that may have just one of several words, include OR (capitalized) between the words. Without the OR, your results would typically show only pages that match both terms. e.g.
[ olympics location 2014 OR 2018 ] Enclose phrases in quotes to search for either one of several phrases.
[ "world cup 2014" OR "olympics 2014" ]

You can also use the wildcard * in your searches including in phrases, so you could try "a * saved is a * earned"

Now searches are only as good as the info that you type in. We started with Victor Gaby, but we've now discovered he was actually Victor F Gaby. 62,300,000 hits, not so good. But lets try it with the quotes. 4 hits, and that's worth checking out.

All of these operators can be used in conjunction with each other, so experiment and get some better search results.

 

[Heilan Lass]

It's also well worth searching on Google if you are trying to track down a copy of an old or out of print book. You are likely to get a lot of results but working through them you may well find the book has been digitised by an academic or other interested organisation. Such books (and they don't have to be that old) are increasingly being digitised - some can be read on line, some can be downloaded in PDF format or for e-readers like Kindle. The "Round About a Pound" book mentioned here on the Booth Maps of London discussion is a good example.

It's also worth "googling" for Parish or other records. A search will often throw up sites that hold a variety of useful details that are free to view and/or not on the "big" sites or in Family History Society holdings e.g. Pallots Middlesex Marriages (see the Middlesex discussion on this forum).

 

[AdrienneQ]

If you search for a name, location etc and than a date range (note the 2 full stops between the dates) you will get results for any numbers within the range

1900..1955

 

[SuzanneD]

You can also narrow a search to a particular website by using the phrase site: followed by the URL at the start of your search term in the Google search box, with no space after the site:. This can be combined with all the other search tips above, to give a search phrase like: [ site:books.google.com "john smythe" -smith ].

This doesn't work for database-driven sites like Ancestry or FamilySearch where all the raw data is hidden, but it is useful for searching for a surname or place-name on local history sites where there are lots of static pages, long lists, will transcripts or similar. It will often pick up more than the site's own search facility because you can combine it with all of the other Google search tricks.

 

[AdrienneQ]

Thats a great hint I just tried it out on Lancshire Parish Clerk site [site:lan-opc.org.uk hesketh] and have some great results

 

[Alexander Bisset]

Google is usually used for finding information on webpages and occasionally places on a map however there are many more things you can do with Google Search that you might not be aware of.

The one I want to highlight is Images. When you are at Google's search page click images on the top bar. Now when you search instead of finding pages of information it searches for images. To demonstrate this I tried with AdrieneQ's "Hesketh" search in the previous post.

Entering Hesketh as a search term brings up a LOT of images of motor bikes and motor cars. I knew we didn't want these so I excluded them from the search. This brings me to another tip the use of - (minus sign) in front of a search (regular or image). When you enter a minus sign before a search term it excludes those items so I tried...

hesketh -motorcycle

Still lots so tried

hesketh -motorcycle -motorbike

lots of formula one references too so I ended up excluding more things and got a reasonable result with

hesketh -motorcycle -motorbike -f1 -bike -car

This gave this result page which as you will see has lots of pictures of people with some relevance to Hesketh. Clicking on the pictures allows you to visit the webpage the picture appeared on and find out more.

Hope this helps and shows that Google does more than it first seems.