Mocavo: New Genealogy Search Site

Moca­vo, a new Inter­net search engine, launched today.

Its focus is on search­ing free genealog­i­cal web­sites. It has gained the atten­tion of the geneal­o­gy blog­gers, show­ing up in Randy Seaver’s Genea-Mus­ings (“First Look at Moca­vo — A New Geneal­o­gy Search Engine”) and Dick East­man’s EOGN (“Mocavo.com — A Geneal­o­gy Search Engine”).

The site offers a very intu­itive inter­face, with a sim­ple, and large, search bar, which tells you to “Enter names, places, years, etc. Full names best in quotes.”

The search results, which exclude con­tent from non-genealog­i­cal sites, such as Face­book and Twit­ter, and focus on free sites geared toward geneal­o­gy (Rootsweb, USGen­Web, Find-a-Grave, and on and on), are gen­er­al­ly rel­e­vant for geneal­o­gists.

I searched for

“Swan John­son” Nance

(Nance being the coun­ty Swan end­ed up in after emi­grat­ing from Swe­den and migrat­ing through Illi­nois and Iowa). I received rel­e­vant results, many of which I had writ­ten, but I not­ed that the results on Rootsweb were there, but none from this blog, though those entries are months old. My sup­po­si­tion then, is that Moca­vo is search­ing a spe­cif­ic sub­set of genealog­i­cal sites — ones where the total name count is already in the bil­lions.

Nev­er­the­less, this seems to be an incred­i­bly pow­er­ful search tool. It will not replace Google for genealog­i­cal data, but it will be a site many of us com­mon­ly use, par­tic­u­lar­ly when our search­es turn on a major­i­ty of social media pages, instead of genealog­i­cal gold.