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.