Some people eat, sleep and chew gum, I do genealogy and write...

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Geneally, a genealogy and family search engine

The Website formerly known as rssgenealogy.com has gotten a new name, Geneally. Geneally claims to be the world's first dedicated genealogy and family search engine. The site is in beta and still under development. Rssgenealogy.com was a genealogy news site. They indicate that they will have a "full launch" in March with links to hundreds of thousands of new links.

Searches on the Beta version of the site seemed to produce quite a few hits for the larger and more visited Websites and products, but returned no results, as yet, for surnames or family Websites. I wonder how they are going to differentiate between personal Websites with family information and commercial family history sites? How do would the search engine know that a site called Blind Pig & the Acorn was a family history site?

One of the most referred to Websites, Cindy's List, currently claims more than 264,040 links. But in discussions among the researchers I talk to frequently, almost no one is using this resource because so many of the links are duplicative or not relevant. Most searchers I know, would rather do a Google search for the same information. The one area in which Cindy's List is still helpful is in starting to look for records from smaller geographic areas, i.e. The Virgin Islands or someplace like that.

I will keep watching Geneally and we will see if it will become a useful site when it goes to its release version.

Just for the record, the Blind Pig & Acorn site does not show up in Geneally, nor in Cindy's List, but it does come up with 38,500 hits on Google.

Another bit of information, not relevant at all, the name of the Blind Pig & Acorn site comes from the saying, "Even a blind pig finds an acorn." There are a number of variations on this saying usually involving truffles rather than acorns.

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