So, what's the difference between this search facility and the other one powered by FreeFind?

The FreeFind engine is a free service that is limited in the number of pages they will index.  If you have a large site they want you to move to their paid service.  This is not unreasonable, but I'm not in a position to pay for these things.   I'm pretty close to their limit.  In fact, I've had to talk them into increasing my limit twice now and they have been very good about it but that can't go on forever.

I submitted my site to Google and they have indexed it.  That means results from my site will show up in Google results if you use the Google search engine.  However, Google has a feature that allows you to restrict your search to a single site.  Anyone using Google can use it.  It's found on the Advanced search page of the Google site.  I have adapted this feature and added this page to my site to allow you to search my site only.

There are some limitations to using Google.  I have no control over when they index my site or even if they index the whole site.  After I do an update the Google spider may not get around to reindexing my site for days or weeks.  During this time you will get results from Google but if you click on a result to go to one of my pages you might not get it if it no longer exists.  The way my site is designed, this should not happen very often.  If you do get the "Whoops!!!" error page try the "cached" copy of the page that is stored by Google.  The link is at the lower right of each Google result.

Google's advanced search page allows the user to search a specific site and I have set up this page to search only rstonesifer.com.  Notice that's not rstonesifer.com/genealogy.   Google doesn't allow that.  If you haven't noticed yet, I have several sites all set up as folders (like /genealogy) under my top level site, rstonesifer.com.  Since the words you will probably be searching for will not occur in the other sections you should get most of your results from the /genealogy section.   Look for "/genealogy" in the results.

Google ignores what it considers common words, like in, a, the, at and will.  If you're searching for "will"s and get a message from Google that it is a common word, just enclose it in quotes and Google will accept it.

Google allows any of the conditions you see above as well as the combination (with a logical "and") of any of them.  If you don't want to do a complex search just use the one that's best for what you're looking for.  Remember, however, if you're looking for "John W Voshell" you may not find him if you put that into the exact phrase search box, because on John's family group page he is listed as "John Wesley Voshell".  There are plenty of other pages where he is called John W Voshell but if you're looking for his family group page you won't find it by searching for "John W Voshell".

So, what to do?  You might not be able to zero in on the single page you want but you might be able to make the search specific enough so you have to look through only a few pages.  Try entering "Voshell" in the all box and "John W" in the exact phrase box.  This will find only pages with Voshell and John W.  Notice that John Wesley contains the string John W so you will find it whether he's listed as John W or John Wesley.

The data file contains both a John Wesley Voshell Jr. and a John Wesley Voshell Sr.  If you want only Jr., enter Sr in the without box.   That will exclude any page that has Sr on it.

Google also allows you to enter new keywords and search only within the previous results.  Look for the "search within results" option next to the keyword box at the BOTTOM of the results page.  In the above example, you could do a search on Voshell then search within those results for John or John W.

Please note that each page contains about 5 individuals that are not necessarily related or connected in any way so sometimes these complex searches might find (or exclude) a page that you don't expect because of the other people on the page.

Of course, the easiest way to find John W Voshell Jr. is to use the Surname list, but it was an interesting exercise wasn't it?