Bing - Thu, 4 Jun 2009

Have you tried Bing yet? This is Microsoft’s new search tool, designed to finally compete with Google. It’s actually quite good. Whether it will be able to compete with Google is a matter of intellectual debate.

Search engines are good for genealogists. Most often we enter our ancestors names into search engines and often find all sorts of interesting leads. Many people have found My Family Research Page that way, and I have had great success through that medium (letting others come to me), connecting me to over 50 previously unknown relatives on many of my lines of research.

When you have a webpage, you want to be able to be found. Often, the “experts” tell you to “optimize” your web pages so the search engines can find you. That’s hogwash. All you have to do is put good content up, not try to hide anything, and you will be found.

As I’m interested in “Genealogy Software”, and I periodically enter that term into different search engines and see what comes out. I also like to see where my GenSoftReviews page ranks in that search. Currently on Google, it is 13th, is 18th on Bing, and unless I missed it does not seem to be in the top 100 on Yahoo. I guess that’s not bad for not trying.

But what really blows me away is this Behold website. I’m not sure how, but as of now, if you simply search for the word “Behold” on the various search engines, you’ll find beholdgenealogy.com number 10 on Google, number 4 on Yahoo, number 5 on Bing. This is out of tens of millions of results.

I find this quite odd. Obviously, I don’t mind that result, but if I were going to a search engine and looking for the word “Behold”, I doubt if I would be expecting a program for genealogy to come up in the top results.

But this does assure me that Behold was a good name for my program, and that it’s getting well-embedded into the Internet. Soon I’ll make the next step and hopefully get it embedded into the genealogy world as well.