Using Google Search for Different Countries -- a Neat Genealogical Research Tool!

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Though there are many search engines out there, I still like to use Google Search.  Part of the reason is that I do like to get “results” that are not in English and are not on “traditional” genealogy websites.

And, periodically, I will get results in a language other than English and using Google Translate in conjunction, I can typically get the “jist” of the information to be found on such a non English page.

I have now learned via Genealogy in Time’s post “A Country Guide to Google Search Engines” that I can actually search on country-specific search engines.

This was kind of a “duh” moment for me.  Given that in the last year I have traveled to Canada, Mexico and Spain and inadvertently ended up on the Google version available in each of those countries, you think that I would have made the “connection” that I could force my browser to mimic that experience. Page 3 of the aforementioned article includes a list of those countries for which there is a Google Search Engine and also those countries/languages for which Google has translation capabilities.

Here I was so proud of myself in that I was “seeing” non-English results and translating them and, as they say, that is only the “tip of the iceburg” as far as really delving into that information that might be available to myself and other researchers via country-specific internet searches.

Though I did have to laugh that even on Google.pl (the Polish version of Google) when I searched on “Wola Pietrusza” + Barna, I ended up on my own website and family research. That said, when I searched on Google.fi (the Finnish version of Google) for Kujanpää + Ylistaro, I did see some of my own research again and this time though, there were many more pages which clearly are about members of the same Kujanpää family as researched by native Finns!

Have you used non-US Google Search engines?

Did you make a neat discovery?

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