Search Government Records with Google
Last week Google released a specialized search for searching government records. The examples that they gave were for searching the IRS for tax information or finding phone numbers for services. However, this could have a big impact on people finding records within government information for genealogy. For example a search for “Colorado
marriage records” brings up a list of pages showing how to access and order marriage
records from Colorado. A search for “1920
Census” brings up 240,000 government records about the 1920 census.
Unfortunately the amount of information available is still left up to how much information
the Government and states want to make available. Ancestry.com and
other subscription sites are still some of the best ways to gain access to the actual
records.
Here is the press
release from the official Google Blog:
Want to find those IRS forms to get in your taxes on time? Need to figure
out where to send your DMV fees, or find the phone number for your local parks and
rec department? Google U.S. Government Search launches
today — it’s a site on which you can 1) search across a huge index of U.S. Federal,
state and local government websites via a single search box, and 2) stay up to date
through personalized content feeds from government agencies and press outlets. Off
you go.For easy bookmarking, go to http://usgov.google.com.
One bug that I found is that if you go to the usgov.google.com page, the default button
is search the web. You need to manually click the “Search Government Websites” button
to actually limit your search to goverment websites.
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Welcome to GenealogyLocator’s new blog
Welcome to GenealogyLocator’s new
blog. For those of you who don’t know, GenealogyLocator is the most popular genealogy
search engine according to Alexa.
We have hundreds of thousands of pages indexed that are devoted entirely to genealogy
and family history. Using GenealogyLocator’s search functionality you don’t need to
worry about receiving porn, spam, or other non-genealogy related content in your search
results. We are able to do this by hand selecting quality sites that either we find,
or our users submit and then indexing those sites. This differs from classical search
engines that just index the entire Internet so you don’t know what quality of results
you will receive.
If you are the webmaster or content manager for a genealogy website
and would like to have your site indexed feel free to submit it at www.genealogylocator.com/addlink.aspx.
This blog will be used to help communicate new features of our
website, links that we feel would be of interest to our users, and also to pass along
any interesting genealogy news that is discovered.
Feel free to submit comments and contribute to the discussion.
Hopefully together we can help pursue this wonderful hobby.
Technorati Tags: Genealogy
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