Re: Altavista better than Google for genealogy searches

On Thu, 15 May 2008 16:54:14 -0700, JJ206
<jj206@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>Steve Hayes wrote:
>> On Thu, 15 May 2008 07:50:42 -0500, "Texas Gen" <texas.gen@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
>> 
>>> Wow----I used Altavista and you are right.  When you are doing a
genealogy 
>>> search maybe use both and whatever other good search engines? 
>> 
>> The thing about Altavista is that my Growden page is specifically about
the
>> family history and genealogy of that particular family, so if someone
is
>> looking for that, it should come up in the first page or two.
>> 
>> On Altavista, it came up with a page of relevant search results. 
>> 
>> On Google that particular page still hadn't come up after 17 pages.
There were
>> quite a lot of pages dealing with papers by a neurologist Dr Growdon
who
>> referred to the family history of his patients and research subjects --
fair
>> enough. There was some stuff I could use, even on page 16 and 17. 
>
>So by your own admission, Altavista eliminated many sites that google 
>shows you (to make up your own mind) and tells you those that are 
>relevant to your search. Google is better as it lets me control more 
>data. Is there a setting on Altavista that lets you increase your hits ? 
>With google, you can easily add -Dr. Growdon with the minus sign to cut 
>out all those hits. But I would not do that out of hand.

My "own admission"?

I think you've missed the point somewhere. 

Firstly, I wasn't complaining about those things being listed in the
search,
just noting that they were. 

Secondly, putting -Dr would not elminate most of them from the search
results
because many of the authors of the academic research papers are listed
without
their academic titles -- as "Growden, JH" for example. 

I tried another experiment, sugested by another poster on the list, and
entered "growdon genealogy" in both Google and Altavista.

The first page on Google brought up a bunch of generic commercial sites,
while
the first page on Altavista produced relevant results. 

Growden is a fairly rare surname, and Growdon is a less common variant.
Perhaps others researching uncommon surnames could try a similar test and
see
which search engine comes up with the most relevant results.


-- 
Steve Hayes
Web: http://hayesgreene.wordpress.com/
     http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/famhist1.htm
     http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7783/