Clare Past Forum

I have been getting useful and quick search returns from the search engine at duckduckgo.com The company placing this online does not do any tracking of your searches, so it is in a wholly different class of Internet entrepreneur from the giants like Google.

I can't be entirely sure about this yet, as I only started using the search engine this week, but it seems that it is not necessary to place a search term in quotes, as with Google. The search returns with duckduckgo show the ones involving the exact phrase first and then list less relevant ones after that. The display is easy to read. I have not needed to do a second search with a classic search engine like Google.

I should also mention a search engine for genealogy, although it has been online since last year: Mocavo.com The business model there is readily apparent, as there are two levels for subscriptions to use it: the free basic level and an advanced level for a fee. The basic version allows the search engine to return a broad swath of material from good resources for genealogy, such as online local history books, family trees, and postings from all the message boards.

Sharon Carberry

I can second this, Sharon. I've been using DuckDuckGo for well over 90% of my searches for more than a year and am very satisfied with it. Apart from protecting your searches from tracking it uses a superb search syntax called !bang (see https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html) which can focus and accelerate searches in a way that is sometimes quite astounding. !bang seems daunting at first but is, in fact, very simple. I found that rather than getting hung up in the instructions one should just go ahead and experiment with it and enjoy the trip.

More at http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/6-really-c ... uckduckgo/

Paddy

Interesting ideas for new search engines. Anyone ever try dogpile - http://www.dogpile.com/ - would it be useful for genealogy? My boss like to use it at work...I tend to stick with google.

Kurt

I tried duckduck. Did not work without quotes. Got the same results but in worse order. The Clare and ireland ones were lower down. Could not recommend

mgallery wrote:I tried duckduck. Did not work without quotes. Got the same results but in worse order. The Clare and ireland ones were lower down. Could not recommend

What do you mean by "Got the same results but in worse order" ? Same as what ?

DuckDuckGo works fine without quotes. Just type in "County Clare Genealogy" (or "!genealogy county clare" if you want to use the !bang syntax) without the quotes and you get a long list of County Clare genealogy sites.

Paddy