Word Order Matters

Tonight as I was preparing my handout for tomorrow's presentation on Effective Google Searching I was reminded of this one minute Youtube video that I share with participants because it explains why Word Order Matters when performing Google searches much better than I can.

I thought some of you might find it useful it too.

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.

Indiscriminate sharing

I was surprised and disappointed yesterday when I saw a pretty poster listing shortcuts for Google Search go viral on Google+ and then spread to other social media and blogs.

What I found disturbing was that a number of genealogists and educators shared this outdated resource without, I suspect, proper evaluation or looking at the reference cited on it , http://www.google.com/insidesearch/tipstricks/ .  If they had checked this source they would have found that it took one to a webpage that had no resemblance to the poster that had been shared. Of course, the unknown author may have been indicating that he used the Google tips and tricks page as a resource to write his poster but I could find no mention of the ~ tilde search on the page.

The poster is attractive and set out various Google shortcuts in a concise and easy to follow way. As soon as I looked at it I noticed a glaring error, the poster told one how to use the ~ tilde  (synonym) search that was one of my favourite Google search tools before it was pulled by Google earlier this year, http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2277383/Google-Kills-Tilde-Search-Operator.

I made a couple of comments on Google plus+ posts about this inaccurate resource but obviously no one took any notice of this cranky old bird.

Particularly disturbing is that when doing their genealogy research genealogists talk about checking the veracity of information before they publish it by checking all references that have been cited and by checking on an author's credentials. Now this resource has been freely shared even though the person originally responsible for the work has not been cited, the date of original publication has not been given and the reference cited on the poster does not lead to the information found in the poster.

I ask you, genealogists, are you guilty of double standards? Before you post links and resources in various social media channels do you apply the same rigid standards that you do to the information in your family histories?