Tuesday's Tip: Google Shortcut Changes

Have you heard?  Those wily programmers at Google have made a change that impacts our Google web searches.  The + sign is no longer functional in a search string; it's been replaced.  To search for an exact word or phrase now, use double quotation marks.

One of my current Google Alerts is:

"morrow county" +ohio

Now, I need to change it to:

"morrow county" "ohio"

The minus sign still works though, as in "clinton county" ohio -jail.  (I was getting too many jailed persons alerts!)

The tilde sign ~ also works like the + sign used to.

I would not have known about this change had I not been subscribed to and read about it in (Dick) Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsetter and Lisa Louise Cooke's The Genealogy Gems E-Newsletter of 26 Oct 2011.  Other search tools are available at Google Support.

Tuesday's Tip is just one of the blogging themes suggested on GeneaBloggers.  Get your ancestors noticed here  --  select a blogging theme from the page tab above and send an image or short story to rootcellarsgs@gmail.com. 

posted by Denise HIbsch Richmond