Week 14: Use a different search engine for your online genealogy research. Google is quite popular, but other search engines may provide different results. Try Yahoo! Search (http://search.yahoo.com/), Bing (http://www.bing.com/), Ask.com (http://www.ask.com/), Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com/), and even Clusty (http://clusty.com/). Pick an unusual surname and search it in different engines. Make note of the top 10 page returns for each. If you’re a genealogy blogger, share your observations on this experience.
I decided to take the whole road on this challenge and try out all of the suggested search engines. Since I’m working on the Ruch/Siegler line, I chose Ruch as the surname to search. I suppose I could have found a more unusual one, but I figured this one would do.
Yahoo aggravated me right off the bat because it assumed I had a typo and really wanted RUSH. What it brought back for me were primarily sites for the county of RUSH in Kansas and Indiana
Bing and Ask were much better, somewhat soothing my dander back down. They both returned much the same sites: genforum, ancestry (in several different areas), my heritage, etc. There were also a couple of sites specific to individual Ruch people, like Uriah and Hilda - not our line. However, I was pleased to see that Ask returned my blog on the first page of returns!!!
As for Dogpile and Clusty, they didn’t return anything outstandingly different from the others.
I don’t know if it would be considered cheating but I did go back to Google to run the same search. Though I can see why varying the search engine could be advantageous, the truth is, in this case, Google was the most comprehensive and still remains my favorite, even though my blog is thirteenth on the list.L
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