Everyone uses Google to find just about everything they could want to find on the internet, and with good reason. Google is a great search engine and it usually gets you what you want, very quickly. There is at least one type of information that Google is not as good at finding, and that is the obscure type. As in the type of information that genealogists seek, ancestral records, seemingly random historical documents, and other sources that are simply not often searched for.
What’s a genealogist to do? You can use Google’s advanced search features to refine your search a bit. Also, there are websites like Ancestry.com and Family Search that are dedicated to providing access (sometimes for a fee) to collections of archived records. There are also search engines that are dedicated to genealogy, the Genealogy Search Engine and Mocavo.
Whether you are looking for genealogical data or something else random or obscure, you just might be able to find it using a lesser known tool for finding the lesser known – Million Short. Million Short is a search engine with little regard for the top one million sites on the internet. Instead, it caters to long tail searches, which are searches for uncommon information.
What kinds of holes are you looking to fill in your genealogy research? If you want to try a new spin on your research, take your quest for the difficult to locate information to Million Short and see what turns up. You may find nothing. Alternatively, you may find just what you are looking for and then some. It’s worth a try, even if you do not think that it is information that would be anywhere in the internet. With so much information being added to the internet each day, you never know when something relevant to your research will come up.