Five New Google Search Tricks
| Tweet |
|
At GenealogyInTime Magazine, we are always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to help people search for their ancestors. This article addresses five radically new approaches to Google search to help you find your ancestors.
1. Google Encrypted Search
Google changed their privacy policy in February 2012. The objective was to standardize privacy across some 80 different products and platforms. The net result of the standardization, however, is that they have reduced their privacy settings to a lower common denominator. They did this to allow different Google applications to share information about the user.
For example, information from Google+, Chrome and from Gmail is now being used to affect your Google search results. One of Google’s ambitions for doing this is to customize search to the specific user.
If you use Google to search for your ancestors, this recent privacy change is going to have a negative impact. You will lose some online privacy when using Google products. Your ancestral search results will also be distorted. This can be illustrated by a simple example. Two different people sitting at two different computers performing the same Google search for the same person will now potentially get different results.
Ancestral records tend to cluster at the distant corners of the internet (see image below). The net effect of the Google privacy changes is that search results will be pushed towards current content at the core and away from historic archived material at the periphery.
This is an actual map of the internet. Ancestral records tend to cluster at the outer periphery on the edges of the internet.
Why would Google do this? Because Google is a general search engine. Most people want core search results, such as how to find a good restaurant or where to buy a car. These account for over 60% of all searches. People searches only account for about 8% of all searches. This includes searches for living people and celebrities. Ancestral searches only account for a very small sliver of that 8 per cent.
