Alan E. Mann, A.G.

fhfair@alanmann.com                                                                                           Accredited Genealogist

Granger West Stake Family History Fair                                                                     April 2004

 

 

Genealogy Metasearch Tools

 

 

I often tell people the Internet is the richest source of genealogical information available today. The amount, scope, and availability of data are staggering, even incomprehensible. It is virtually certain that there is valid information about your ancestors on the Internet that you don’t have. Information that you would probably want if you only knew it was there.  So how can you find it? With a lot of searching. This session looks at tools that implement a concept called metasearching.

 

What is metasearch?  The term does not yet appear in most dictionaries, but is a common term on the web. It is used most commonly to describe an Internet metasearch engine. The general idea is that you submit keywords in its search box, and it then transmits your search to several individual search engines simultaneously. Within a few seconds, you get back results that came from several search engines. Metasearch engines do not have their own index or database of Web pages; they send your search terms to those kept by search engine companies, then combine the results from their indexes.

 

While the term usually applies to Internet search engines which are used to try to find web pages on a specific topic, this class extends the idea to genealogy web pages. Generally speaking, a genealogy metasearch tool would be something that searches several databases or several web sites. Using this definition, metasearches can either be those that search several databases on a single site or tools that search several web sites and combine the results. This class will look at examples of both types of metasearches.

 

 

Single Site Metasearches

 

Here, we can talk about Ancestry, Heritage Quest Online, FamilySearch, RootsWeb, or a variety of other web sites. These are sites that have a lot of databases, but have a search that will search through and present results from all of the different databases.

 

USGenWeb. The simplest would be the USGenWeb Archive. Here, there are hundreds of thousands of files representing extracts, transcriptions, abstracts, and indexes to many millions of names. The site search engine allows you to search all of their files at once or all of the files for any single state. However, the search options are extremely limited. Basically, you can search for any word in any of the files selected, but you cannot specify whether the word is a name, place, relationship, or something else. This is called a freeform, general, or unfielded search. While it does offer the advantage of searching many things at once, it doesn’t give much flexibility to limit or narrow the search results.

 

Ancestry. This is a site with many different databases. They have made a default search that searches across those databases—census, wills, family history books, obituaries, and more. When you go to their site, the search has several different fields. You search by name, but can add country, state or province, year range, keyword, and record type. You can also specify whether to use soundex or exact spelling. The search template does not change when you specify a record type. But if you select a record type from the list at the right, the search template changes. You will then probably only be able to specify name and keyword. You also will get a list of databases so that you can further restrict your search. The general policy for Ancestry is to search the database for the items specified, but to ignore any input fields that don’t apply to that database. For example, if you specify a range of years, but the database being searched doesn’t specify years, Ancestry’s metasearch will just ignore the year range and display any results from that database.

 

FamilySearch. This site lists the databases that it searches along the left. The default is “all resources,” which is the metasearch. You can also select a specific database to search. When you choose a specific database, you get additional search options. FamilySearch’s general policy is to restrict your search fields to just those fields that are common to the databases being searched. Thus, when you do an all resources search, you have a certain search template. When you select census records, you get some different options. When you select a specific census to search, you get yet some additional options that are unique to that census. There are some exceptions, however. For example, the web site search disregards everything you enter except surname (which makes this search nearly useless, except for unusual surnames).

 

Heritage Quest Online. This site has some very useful ways of grouping results and actually has the most flexible searches. It is less of a metasearch than the other sites listed here because it has three categories, and has no single search that searches all three categories. Nonetheless, there are thousands of databases searched within a category.

 

 

Multiple Site Metasearch Tools

 

Perhaps the best example of a multiple-site metasearch is Internet Family Finder (www.genealogy.com/ifftop.html). This searches over 300,000 separate family history databases. Unfortunately, the search has no true fields other than first and last name, but those have been well identified—making it much more useful than USGenWeb’s text only search.

 

Another example is more of a tool than a search—Charles Culman’s MultiGen. Located at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/CACulman/MultiGen.htm, this site allows you to enter a name once, and then submit a search request to ten different genealogy sites at once.  If you select the “open new window” option and then click on “Search them all,” you will get ten windows with the separate results from each of the ten sites. While not a true metasearch because it doesn’t combine the results, it does save you some time and conduct several searches at once…

 

 

Other Information about Metasearching

 

One important thing to know about metasearching is that the quality of their results depends on what they search and how they organize the results. A metasearch cannot be better than the sum of the individual databases they query.

 

There are some good general web metasearch engines which are not designed as genealogical search tools, but which can be used to search for genealogy or genealogically-related topics.  Let’s take a quick look at metasearch engines.

 

Three of the most unique are Kartoo (www.kartoo.com), Zapmeta (www.zapmeta.com) and Vivisimo (www.vivisimo.com). These find results and try to group results by common terms found on the result pages. This can be very helpful, with some extra helpful features on ZapMeta (turn snapshots on). Try them out! For more general Internet search tools, see http://searchenginewatch.com/links/article.php/2156241.

 

What makes a good Internet metasearch is an engine that searches good databases, accepts complex searches, integrates results well, eliminates duplicates, and offers additional features such as clustering by subjects within your search results.

 

Doesn’t forget the need to know what you are searching—what’s the scope, the source, and how do you use it?

 

 

©Copyright 2004 by Alan E. Mann.  All rights reserved.  Written permission to reproduce all or part of this syllabus material  in any format, including photocopying, data retrieval or the Internet, must be secured in advance from the copyright holder.