Searching for Records on Interment.net
by Steve Johnson
August 27, 2010
 The
search engine has been the most popular feature on Interment.net
since it was first introduced nearly 10 years ago.
When it was first launched, it was powered by Microsoft's Index
Server, which is a very robust search engine, indexing documents
instanteously as we uploaded, edited, and removed transcriptions.
But it wasn't able to handle the massive volume of search queries
minute-by-minute, and it consumed a lot of server resources which
only slowed down the website.
In March 2009 we replaced it with Google's CSE (Custom Search Engine),
which offers the same robust searching capabilities, but is more
than capable of handling the large search queries, and because all
the searching is done on Google's end, it allows our web server
to run more quickly. However, because Google CSE relies on Googlebot
to index uploads, edits, and deletions, it doesn't have the instantaneous
updating that Index Server has, though it still seems to update
within a couple of days.
Search Techniques
Because Interment.net's search engine is now based Google's search
engine, you can use the same search arguments and operators that
you use with Google.
Searching for records - All names on Interment.net are
published as lastname-first, given name-second, separated by a
comma...
Doe, John, b. 1896, d. 1961,
To search for a name, you can enter the query anyway you want,
either as "John Doe" or "Doe, John". The search
engine does a pretty good job of finding the most relevant results.
Quotation Marks - But you can also surround your query
with quotation marks if you want to search for an exact match...
"John Doe"
But remember that all names on Interment.net are published lastname
first, given name second, separated by a comma. Hence, if you
tried the above example with quotation marks, you'll likely get
no results.
Quotation marks are useful if you're searching for a cemetery
name, or place name.
Wildcard Operator - the asterisk (*) can be used to find
words that might have different spellings (eg. Kincaid and Kincade).
Use the asterisk as follows...
kinca*
This will find all records that include either Kincaid and/or
Kincade.
You can place the asterisk in front of, or at the end of any
word.
Finding Records In a Specific Region - There are three
ways to limit your searches to a specific region...
- Navigate to any page within that region, and conduct a search
using the search box at the upper-left of the page. For example,
if want to limit your searches to just California cemeteries,
then visit any California page on Interment.net, and then run
a search from there.
- Or, use the site:URL argument as follows...
kincaid site:*/data/us/ca
This will find all pages that include the word "kincaid"
but limit to those pages published under the California data
subdirectory.
- Or, add the region name to your search query...
kincaid california
This will find all pages that include both of those words.
Since all cemetery transcriptions published on Interment.net
include the country, state, province, county, shire, etc., you
can use that to limit your search results. But it's possible
you'll see results for regions other than California if that
word is found anywhere on the page, and it often happens as
a someone's birthplace within a record. So, it's not always
an accurate way to limit searches to a specific region, but
it's the most convenient way.
All In Title Search - You can use the "allintitle:"
operator to search for keywords within the <TITLE> tags
of pages. For example...
allintitle: orange county
This will return all pages that contain the words "orange"
and "county" in the <TITLE> tags. If you're familiar
with HTML, the <TITLE> tags are the words that appear at
the very top of your web browser's window.
This search is useful if you want to quickly see what cemeteries
are published on Interment.net within a specific region, or if
a specific cemetery name exists.
More Advanced Search Help - tips and tricks on using Interment.net's
search engine, visit Google's Help Page on advanced searching...
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861
Genealogy Links
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