Adding inurl to a Google Domain Search
As a follow-up to my blog post yesterday showing how to do a domain
search on Google, I would now like to demonstrate the use of the “inurl:”
search criteria, adding it to the domain search. I would like to do this so I can
search on a single state or county name, or other names, such as cemeteries,
census, directories, history, military, photos, or schools. When using “inurl:”, be
sure that it specifies a valid directory name on the web server, or a part of the
web page name. So, to change my search, ”site:ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/ Yale”,
to only look for Yales in the state of Connecticut, I add the 2 character abbreviation
for Connecticut (ct) to ”inurl:”, giving ”inurl:ct”, because I know that
some Yales lived in this state, and now I’d like to find more of them, not just Elihu.
My Google search now becomes “site:ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/ Yale
inurl:ct”, and it returns 17
results, which is a doable amount to drill-down on and research further.
Now I’d like to show you how to use the domain and inurl search criteria on another
site, namely FamilySearch.org. Because FamilySearch.org already
has an excellent search engine that we can use to research our ancestors, and its
relatively easy to use, we normally would not perform a Google domain search using
“site:www.familysearch.org”. However, when performing this domain search on Google,
and adding “inurl:search”, a total of 89,800
results are returned. When analyzing some of these results I saw that they could
be useful for my genealogy research if I add a surname, as I have done here:
“site:www.familysearch.org inurl:search Yale”, as it now returns 353
results. Then, adding a year, a first name, a state name, a county name, a city
name, or a cemetery name will further limit the search results and assist me in finding
what I’m looking for. In this case, I added the city name of “Hartford” and now have 12
results to look at. It is not possible to search on a city name or cemetery name using FamilySearch.org’s
regular and advanced search forms, so this Google search gives me results I could
not otherwise obtain.
I hope my explanations for using Google’s site and inurl search criteria will help
you do a better job at researching and finding your ancestors. In my next blog
post I will investigate and discuss using the “inurl:” criteria without the
“site:” criteria on Google. This can be useful when searching for more generic terms,
or specific city names, county names, or even surnames.
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