While I'm a big believer that you can find a lot of stuff that you need in life simply by Googling it, there's no doubt in my mind that you can also get caught up in a lot of irrelevant or even flat-out erroneous information by relying on an Internet search for your data.

Another of the booths I visited in the exhibit hall at last month's National Genealogical Society conference was that of Mocavo, which bills itself as a search engine specially tailored to genealogists.

Michael J. Leclerc, Mocavo's chief genealogist, described the search engine as a way for family historians to target their Internet research time more effectively by giving more relevant searches.

"Because Mocavo only includes genealogically relevant sites in the index, it isn't necessary to sift out all of the Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube results, etc., when looking for your people," he said.

Subscribers to Mocavo have access to a "My Connections" section once they upload their family trees - which can be kept private or made public - to the site.

"The search engine works in the background to search for people in the tree," Leclerc said. "Results appear in the My Connections section."

Leclerc also noted that Mocavo keeps subscribers informed by e-mail of new possibilities.

"Hundreds of new sites are added each week," he said.

Another highlight available to American subscribers is that when a city or town is entered in the location field of the search engine, Mocavo comes up

Finally, Mocavo subscribers get access to a lot of advance search features including: "First Name Variants" (e.g., a search for Nancy also provides results for Ann);"Sounds Like" (metaphone search for surnames); and date range searches that allow researchers to narrow their focus more than other sites (plus or minus 10 years, 12 months, or 30 days).

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Roots and Branches: Move over Google, here's Mocavo