Using google to search

[sueannbowen]

I came upon this the other day which is quite useful. You can use an external search engine like Google to search the forum in one go.You would put in:

Simpson site:www.british-genealogy.com where Simpson is the thing you are looking for. This makes Google search the forum only rather than the whole web. It works with other websites too and is handy if you want to see if someone else has already asked the question.

That is not to say the search engine on this forum doesn't work perfectly well because it does! I used BGs web address as an example

[Waitabit]

How to lead people astray from their intended BG search

[Sue Mackay]

I have a free Firefox Add-on called Search Site, which plonks a little green magnifying glass in the corner of the Google box at the top right of my screen. I don't use it for B-G, as I use the B-G search engine, but in some other sites I merely click on it and it brings up a Google page specific to that site for me to type my query into.

[Peter Goodey]

Not that google is the only search engine. Google with its appalling attitude to user privacy is now my bottom choice. Anyone who cares about privacy may like to try duckduckgo.com which doesn't track users. It also has an SSL option - put https:// before duckduckgo.com. Its results are said to be consistent and don't vary from user to user.

Duckduckgo accepts the site: parameter described above (the www. in the example is not needed, by the way).