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A Country Guide to Google Search Engines

In this article, we look at arguably the single most important factor in finding your ancestors with a Google search.

To get the most out of any Google search for your ancestors, it is necessary to understand how Google works. An important consideration is to realize that Google runs different search engines in different parts of the world. For example, Google.com is the search engine for the United States, Google.ca is used for Canada, while Google.co.uk is the search engine for the United Kingdom. In total, there are close to 200 different Google search engines.

Most people don't realize that the choice of Google search engine has a profound impact on the search results that are delivered to you. Choose the right Google search engine when searching for your ancestors and you will get good results. Choose the wrong one and you will almost certainly come up empty handed. In this article, we show you how to choose the right Google search engine.

One of the most powerful (yet often overlooked) features of Google search is to make sure you use the correct Google search engine. Not only is this suggestion an excellent genealogy brick wall solution, it is often the major success factor for online genealogy searches.
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Focusing on the right geographic region with the right Google search engine will significantly increase your chances of success.

The following simple example demonstrates the power of using the right Google search engine. Suppose you are looking for John Smith. Most people assume Google.com and Google.co.uk will give you the same search results for the same query. This is simply not true. Sometimes, the search results are not even close, as shown below.

John Smith search from Google.com
Search results for John Smith from Google.com


John Smith search from Google.co.uk
Search results for John Smith from Google.co.uk

Notice the difference between the two search results for the exact same search query? Now imagine what would happen if you were to perform a more complicated ancestral search on different Google search engines. The results are likely to be very different from each other.

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