At some point all family history research leads to a 'dead end' where leads just seem to dry up and many of the posts on this site relate to finding 'missing links'. I've had some great success using the following technique and I hope it helps others.

Firstly, you need to understand how the internet works, or at least how the search engines work, e.g. Google, Yahoo, etc, etc. For the purposes of this example well focus on Google. It uses a system of keywords to match your query (the visitor) with web pages delivering that content (the providers). These keywords are the search terms you (and millions of others), type on the search bar. The results passed back are those pages, or providers, that meet the search term. As you can imagine, competition by the large commercial organisations to be returned in a good list position is fierce and so large amounts of marketing spends are focussed on ensuring high ranking within the search engines.

OK? So what does that mean for us? Last month, May 2006, approximately 152,000 people typed in a search for Genealogy. Ive just typed the same search into Google. 73.6 million web pages were returned in the results! Not surprisingly most of the top positions are taken by either the main database vendors or resellers (affiliates) of the major vendors.

Now the internet contains THOUSANDS of personal websites where researchers (just like you), publish their family tree hoping to make connections. The problem is they have almost no chance of reaching top positions on search results and so are difficult to find.

So how do we find them?

1. Be More (very) Specific

What were these people typing genealogy actually looking for? Genealogy Scotland, Genealogy book, genealogy Cowan? Who knows, but they were presented with was the main commercial vendors keen to get some subscriptions.

2. Combine keywords + phrases

Now lets try: genealogy scotland + smith (try it)

Were getting closer, about 872,000 results, quite a few but much more specific and beginning to return some interesting personal websites.

3. Search rules (syntax)

Did you notice the + sign in the example above? To the search engine this means and so, the results returned will contain; genealogy OR scotland AND smith.

Now try this: genealogy scotland + smith

Note: The quotes around "genealogy scotland"means to match the EXACT PHRASE and this is particularly useful when looking for specific individuals e.g. "John William Smith".

So the search above returned about 19000 results, much better, and some very specific sites containing personal family history pages.

As you can see the best search results come from being very specific. Of course you can vary these searches to include placenames, dates, etc, etc. The same rules apply to most of the major search engines. One last thing, most of the search engines include an 'Advanced' search button, this will further allow inclusion / exclusion of certain terms, dates, etc.