Kimberly Powell has completed her new series of genealogy tips, Twelve Google Search Tips for Genealogists that could be of great use to beginning genealogists (and even those who are just new to the internet). It’s a good series – it gets into the semantics of how to make the most effective searches – most of us just type in the words we are looking for and then sort through the results – she points out to get more relevant results faster. She also mentions how to retrieve information when you turn up a site that no longer exists – in many cases that site may have been cached by Google or elsewhere, and you might still be able to retrieve relevant information.
As an example, one part of the “Search With a Focus” tip:
Use a minus sign before words that you want to be excluded from the search. This is especially useful when searching for a surname with a common usage such as rice or one which is shared with a famous celebrity such as Harrison Ford (i.e. you would enter your search as ford -harrison to exclude results with the word ‘harrison’).