A New trick for the lousy typist

Sitting at the computer today updating my Geneagoogling: Effective Google Searching presentation for my gig at The Parramatta Family History Group Meeting on Saturday has made me play around with Google.

I included a couple of slides on the newly reborn Google News Archive Search and then thought I should explore Google Voice Search. Now I thought this would be a bit gimmicky but decided to put it through its paces - I am in awe.

I usually don't go to the Google search page to carry out my searches I search by entering my query in the Chrome address bar. As I was preparing my slides today I noticed the microphone icon in the  search box on the Google search page and thought I should give it a whirl.

See the microphone icon in the search box

The first question I asked was "What is Genealogy?" I was rewarded with some results and a female voice reading me the definition at the top of the results page. Well done Google.

What is genealogy? Search results

I then tried GeniAus as a search term, Google was not able to cope with this or with a search for the Pusell name from my ancestry. I guess GeniAus and the Pusell family don't rate too highly in the Googlesphere. 

I carried on with searches for terms that might be more recognisable to Google like Hornsby, Sydney, Cobar (Place names) and general terms like Family History and Genealogy. Google recognised all of these. I did an image search for the Parramatta Female Factory and that also came up trumps.

Parramatta Female Factory search results

I may have to review my Google search habits.

I am a fan of voice recognition and have previously blogged about my use of the Dragon software which is getting rather old now. After playing with Google Voice Search I got to thinking that if Google had made voice recognition available on search then it would probably have it enabled for other apps like Google Drive so I did a search...

Google support tells me "You can speak instead of typing into any text box that contains this microphone icon  " but one of my fave bloggers Amit from Digital Inspiration told me in a post (when I was holidaying last year so I didn't read it) about "Dictation v2.0, a web-based speech recognition app that will transcribe your voice into digital text using the Chrome Speech API. " He goes on to say "Getting started with Dictation in simple. Just plug in the microphone to your computer, click the Start Dictation button and watch as your spoken words are magically transformed into text. I'll have to see if it works with Google Drive.

Guess what GeniAus is going to do for the rest of the afternoon? I'll report on my investigations anon.

Family History Through the Alphabet – N is for …Browser

Netscape Navigator was the first browser I used consistently to surf the web in the mid nineties after using Mosaic for my early explorations in cyberspace. If I remember correctly Netscape came installed on my computer and, if one didn't get it this way one had to purchase it. 

By Browser I mean a piece of computer software that provides a conduit for people to search for, find and access information on the World Wide Web. Wikipedia  tells me "A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web". So I guess I have it right!

When Microsoft introduced the free Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996 I tried that out too. I also dabbled with Yahoo's search. As Yahoo was a directory rather than a search engine I did not use it too often preferring Internet Explorer. Then, after it was released, I was true to the Australian search engine ANZWERS for local searches until Mozilla Firefox came along in 2004. I had a long relationship with Firefox until around 18 months ago when I was seduced by Google's Chrome.

I dabbled with a few metasearch engines like Dogpile and  Mamma  in the early 2000's but these do not seem to have taken off. A metasearch engine simultaneously searches a number of search engines for you and aggregates the results in one list.

On my Android devices I have tried a few browsers and over a year ago switched from Opera to the Dolphin browser.

There are a couple of genealogy search engines around. As I don't have a very high opinion of the most popular one I am not even going to mention its name. I believe that carefully constructed searches on a general search engine will return better results than that product.

I believe that a book without an index is useless similarly if we didn't have an efficient browser to provide a gateway to the World Wide Web we would not be able to easily access all the wonderful genealogy resources in cyberspace.

Which browser do you favour?