Craig has posted half of his so far excellent four-part series on the "Internet Biographical Collection" (IBC) fiasco at geneablogie.
My position on this now is that I'd actually like to use a genealogy-oriented search engine, one that didn't require me to use all sorts of filtering tricks to ignore the rest of the web. Just a search engine, though. Not a site that does what Ancestry did, though. They really screwed up, in my opinion, all in the name of making a buck.
PS - I'm behind on podcasts and just finished listening to the Aug. 28th edition of "The Genealogy Guys." I like George and Drew, but I can't believe they were supporting the IBC. Sorry, but I don't think it compares to Google or the Internet Archive. (Actually, I'll let Craig determine that.) Google is free to use. The IA's Wayback Machine is free to use. Ancestry, for the most part and specifically in this case, was not free. Additionally, the content was presented in a way that implied it was Ancestry's or submitted to them. That clearly wasn't the case and I think that's what caused most of the backlash. If Ancestry had simply put a new "Internet Genealogy Search" section on their front page or put it on a new domain (GeneaGoogle?), they may have been hailed as heroes.
[genealogy]
1 comment:
David,
I agree 100% with you. The Genealogy Guys either didn't have enough information, or they chose not to know the whole story, and so they went on and on about something they did not have intimate knowledge of. They lost a bit of credibility in my eyes if they were going to report on, and offer their opinion on a story they were not familiar with.
If indeed they had made a free search engine (not a database of cached pages) they MAY have been heroes.... [note the MAY].
Great post
Janice
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