Anthony Marshall is producing a genealogy-specific search engine called Kincrawler. As of this morning, his database contains links to 771,744 free genealogy pages. And he’s going for a billion…
I did a search for the surname “Canfield,” and got 760 hits. That’s twice the number I got yesterday. And he’s just getting started. The engine is currently crawling usgenweb archives, many family trees, message board posts and some blogs.
Each search result includes a ranking score. Basically, the software searches the index for pages that have matching words. These are then scored based on a weighting factor for the title, description, link, and matching words in a page. If the weighting factor for the title is set high then links with matching words in the title will be ranked higher. The same goes if the weighting factor for the meta description was set high; then the rank would be higher if that page had matching words in the description. Since there are weighting factors for several different factors the software uses an algorithm to rank the links and give them a score.
