52 weeks to better genealogy- week 14 search engines

Well, here is this week's challenge... to try different search engines. 

52 Weeks To Better Genealogy by Amy Coffin(http://wetree.blogspot.com/2010/01/52-weeks-to-better-genealogy.html) is a series of weekly blogging prompts that are a bit more challenging and are geared towards those new to the field of genealogy and family history as well as those who want to brush up on some skills which might be a bit rusty.

I usually use Google or Yahoo, so I thought I would try a few different engines.  I tried Bing, with the name Antonipieri, a rare Italian surname of mine ( see earlier post for the map of surname in Italy).  Bing did not bring up my blog posts in the top 10 as Google had.  So I next tried dogpile.com  It had my blog posts about midway on the list.... but it had an intriguing way of locating them through a site called www.bloglines.com.

 I had never heard of that site, so I investigated it.  You can search for anything in posts anywhere in blogs!  You can also register for free, and list your blogs, blogs you follow, etc. and narrow searches to those if you wish.  At that point, I quit with the original challenge of the "major" search engine, and spent time investigating this specialized search engine. Although it won't bring up the rootsweb and ancestry hits as Google or Yahoo, it works wonders with blogs, and often that's where the best info and tips can be found!

I had fun playing with this, as now I can search for a blog post by one of my fellow genies without having to remember who wrote it, and which blog I saw it in.   So while I started out looking to see the differences in search engines as not that great a challenge, I wound up finding a new research tool.   Cool!
Thanks, Amy for the challenges, and Thomas for bringing them to my attention! [and Randy, I can't make these as pretty as your posts.... yet!]

Now I can work on Faithful Friday and Surname Saturday posts!