Lyceum Course - Internet Genealogy - Search Basics
- Everyone Knows How to Fill Out Forms - Right!
- Click for
Learning Forms
- And some think Internet genealogy is so easy. Ancestry Note: Portions are by subscription only.
- And for the Internet there are a Googol's(1) worth of types of forms!
- Getting to a Site is Just a Start - Sites Use an Amazing Array of Forms
- Sites with Simple, Usually Single Entry Forms
- Sites Using Complex Forms An illustration using the List Archives at Rootsweb
- The Advanced Search at Google
- The big difference between a RootsWeb Archive Search and a Google form is
the structure of the Database it's searching.
- RootsWeb deals with a known collection of e-mails from it's
own mailing lists, each with different focus and name.
- Google constructs an even more complex database by crawling the
whole WWW and collecting Key Words from each and every site -
though not within Portal Sites, where membership or some other type of entry is required.
- Less Restrictive Keys - Wildcards - Inexact Searches
- Many Different Search Strategies Search Strategies
- Not All Searches Are Simple or Easy - Expectations
- Summarizing Forms - Forms Vary Greatly
- In number of fields
- By use of Buttons and Check Boxes
- In which fields are required, which optional
- Whether or not fields require an exact match
- How the data entered may be used/modified for the search
- Lessons to Be Learned
- Experiment to learn capability of a given form
- Always try multiple ways of searching with the same form
__________ __ __________ __ __________
- Note (1). Before the company and the search engine there was the "Googol" - A one followed by 100 zeros; or 10100
© Prepared by Jay March 6, 2012
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