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Finding Information

 
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roger.pape
Site Admin


Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 414
Location: Liverpool, NY

PostPosted: Mon Jan 25, 2010 4:35 pm    Post subject: Finding Information Reply with quote

Do you want to find out if there is information about a particular family name or subject on this message board? Or did your read something in a previous posting and can’t remember where it was?

Since this is a small site, there are no plans to add an alphabetic index of family forums such found on websites like RootsWeb, GenCircles, or Lutherans Online. To check for family surnames, the one obvious approach is to look at the list of family forums on the main page of the message board. If you don’t see it there, you can click on the ‘Other families’ forum and check for a name in the list of topics. The same approach applies to a subject you may be looking for. But the titles of topics only give the gist of the posting and there may be additional information in them.

In this “Age of Google”, we all tend to look for information on the Web by using search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. (Do people still use concordances?) As I have noted before, this website has been blocked from the spiders used by the various search engines to index the contents of websites. (This was done to avoid undesirable traffic from spammers and others who have no interest in the Concordia area or people.) So you probably didn’t arrive at this website by googling.

In case you haven’t noticed, the message board has its own search tool. Just click on the Search link at the top of the page. Type in a keyword, i.e. a surname like Runge or a subject like creamery and the search tool will return a list of all postings that contain that word or phrase. Then click on the title of a topic to read the posting. When you scroll down through the article, you will see the word or phrase you searched for displayed in a different color. The search tool has the usual features, like wildcards and Boolean operators, that are explained in Section 4.5 of the User Guide (in the quick start guide topic in the User guides forum).

Note. This search tool only works for information posted on the message board. Finding something on another page of the website depends on the format used to put that information on the site. If it is text displayed directly on the webpage, you can use the ‘Find’ command in the Edit menu of your web browser. This also applies to the church records, for example, when you view them on-line. Some of the files may open up a word processor like MS Word. In that case you would use the search capability for that particular tool. If the information is in a .pdf file, like the Frerking Family History, you may be able to search the file with the viewer’s search capability. Some files, however, may consist only of graphic images of pages (particularly handwritten material). In that case, the reader search function will not work. Some of the pdf files have been converted to searchable image files which display the original image but have a hidden text layer behind the pages that allows one to search for words or phrases. I have tried to convert all of pdf image files to searchable image files, but there may be some that are not searchable. Give it a try. If searching doesn’t work, you will know why.

Happy hunting. “...seek, and ye shall find...” Matt. 7:7
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roger.pape
Site Admin


Joined: 17 Mar 2009
Posts: 414
Location: Liverpool, NY

PostPosted: Wed Jan 21, 2015 11:06 am    Post subject: Search engine update Reply with quote

After the information about finding something on the message board was first posted above, the restriction on search engines was lifted. In other words, the spiders from the various web search engines are allowed to prowl this board. They periodically scan the website and index information they find on it. So if you 'google' for a particular name, place, or event, you may get a link to one or more of the postings on this message board. This applies to all of the search engines, like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.

Note, however, that I make no effort to optimize the ranking, so the link may occur far down in the list that is returned from the search. It all depends on the search terms that you enter.
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