Re: Altavista better than Google for genealogy searches

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. 

But many of the Google results came up with surname search sites that
didn't
have any useful information, but were just programmed to come up when
anyone
was looking for a surname and genealogy. Some of them say no, they don't
have
any information on Growdon but search our (pay per view) site for any
other
surnames you may be interested in. That's not useful information -- it's
commercial fluff. When Google started 10 years ago it wasn't like that -
it
was better than the other search engines and produced more relevant
results.
That's how it got to be the leading search engine. But it's lost its edge
and
some of the others have caught up and passed it -- at least for delivering
genealogically relevant results. 

I'm not saying don't use Google at all, but perhaps try other search
engines,
like Altavista, first. 

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