Google bewitched?

A few weeks ago a book I contributed to was published. It is on African Initiatives in Healing Ministry, and it was published by Unisa Press.

The marketing department of the publishers are supposed to place a web page for the book on their site, to say what the book is about, explain how to order it and so on. I wanted to see if they had done so, so that I could refer to that page when I wrote to people who might be interested in buying it.

The quickest way to see if the page was up, I thought, was to Google for the title of the book. So I did that. And what did Google come up with?

This.

Powerful witchcraft Spell
www.profzamba.co.za
Extremely Powerful Spells, Love Money, Revenge, 082 257 2395

Extreme Spiritual Healing
www.extremespiritualhealing.co.za
+27 73 476 3119 Love, Good Luck spells and more
Voted #1 Spell Caster

www.3witches.co.za
Call the most powerful spell caster today ..Dr Kubo +2776 53 74611

I suspect that someone must have cast a very powerful spell on Google to get it to return that as the top three results on a search for "African initiatives in healing ministry".

People who are looking for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) need look no further. Don't call an "SEO consultant", call a witch.

Search engines for genealogy and family history research

Over the last ten years or so Google has become the most popular web search engine — to much so that “to google” has become synonymous with searching the web. It’s become a generic term.

When Jackie Seaman announced her Growden reunion, I thought I’d do a web search for Growden, and started with Google because Firefox puts it so conveniently in the toolbar. Growden (or Growdon) is one of the less common surnames I’m researching, and we have a web page just for Growdon family researchers. But Google didn’t find it — at least not in the first 17 mages of results.

I tried another search engine, Altavista, and our Growdon page came up on the first page of results.

I tried another search engine, Dogpile, which is an aggregator of results from several different search engines, and our Growdon page was also on the first page of results, but further down.

It seems that Google is definitely not the best search engine for genealogical and family history research. Altavista (www.altavista.com) was better by a long way, and its first page of results was far more relevant to genealogy researchers.

The first page of results on Google produced a bunch of generic surname search sites, many of them commercial. This means that they show up on search results for anyone looking for any surname at all. If you try some of them you might find they have no information at all on Growdon (or whatever surname you are looking for), but then invite you to look for other surnames. And quite often, if they do have information, they ask you to pay upfront before you can see it.

Dogpile also came up with quite few of those generic surname sites, but did have more relevant sites on the first page of search results as well.

But Altavista came up with “real” Growdon/Growden sites first — people who were actually interested in Growden family history, and had information or were looking for information, rather than generic surname search sites.

So if you are looking for family history information on the web, don’t just “google” for it — try other search engines as well. You may be pleasantly surprised.

(Originally posted in my family history blog, but copied here as it may be of wider interest).

Fraudulent Google searches

Having an idle moment waiting for the kettle to boil I remembered finding a blog with a similar name to mine, and decided to look for it on Google, where I found this:

Notes from underground: Urban legend: government to replace

12 Nov 2007 by laiiwjmi bGovernment/b employees demand more bholidays/b and higher pay. When the Danish bgovernment/b intervened in spring 1998 to end the major private sector industrial b/bLink to Queensland bGovernment/b (www.qld.gov.au) b/b Public ... btyu.mevent.org - http://btyu.mevent.org/

and a few others like it. That is not a blog similar to mine, but it has nicked the title of a post I wrote in my blog (Notes from underground: Urban legend: government to replace Christian public holidays), though the content is nothing like it.

Entering "Notes from underground: Urban legend: government to replace" into Google blog search produces some interesting results -- a long list of bogus blog sites.

Should one report this to Google, as it seems fraudulent, to say the least?