A new website looks like an interesting tool for harvesting useful information from the online jungle. While I don't believe it is particularly suitable for finding your ancestors, it may be very helpful to genealogists who are seeking information about the times and places in which those ancestors lived. I found it to be a great method of finding history of an area, including the places where your ancestors lived.
GoogleReport.org is described as an "online report creator tool." It creates intelligent reports on your questions, compiled from relevant websites. In operation, it appears to be a cross between Google and Wikipedia.
First of all, GoogleReport.org is neither owned by nor affiliated with Google. It is an independent web site. I wonder how long that name will last as it sure looks like a trademark infringement to this non-lawyer. Whatever the name, GoogleReport.org retrieves information from various websites that match your query and then summarizes the information on one webpage as a report.
With so much information online, people often become overwhelmed when search engines give them thousands of listings to explore. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and others are great at finding information, but they typically create long lists of many "hits," each of which displays one occurrence of the word(s) you specified in the search. In contrast, GoogleReport.org finds and creates reports. Almost all the "hits" point to pages that contain meaningful information about the word rather than a mere occurrence of the word.
I first used GoogleReport.org to search for some ancestors. I had almost zero success. In short, that is not what it is designed for. Next, I decided to look for information on the small town where my great-great-grandfather lived. I have already found quite a bit of information about the town in previous Google-based web searches. I wanted to see if GoogleReport.org could find the same information.
I went to http://www.GoogleReport.org and entered the following in the search block:
history Corinth Maine
Indeed, GoogleReport.org quickly returned several "hits," and each was an extract from a longer report on the web. Instead of simply finding occurrences of the words in my search terms, the site found detailed reports that matched my search criteria. It displayed about a dozen web sites, and almost all of them were new to me. I read about the building of the various schoolhouses in that small town, as well as the churches, the mills, the stores, and more. The information came from a number of different web sites.
I then went on and tried a number of other small towns, starting with the word "history" followed by the town's name and the state. Each produced similar results. I then searched for:
railroads Bangor Maine
I was rewarded with a smaller number of "hits," but the few I found were all interesting. One of them contained a link to an extensive site called "History of Railroading in Maine" which supplied details about when the railroad first reached the towns of several of my ancestors.
GoogleReport.org has pointed me to all sorts of information I have missed until now. While poking around in the history of the small town where I was born and raised, I discovered that the hospital where I was born had a new owner. Originally, the building had been the private residence of a doctor who bequeathed it to the town. It was converted to a hospital but always look more like a private residence. I already knew that the hospital closed in 1987 and was vacant for some years. It seems that the building had another owner for a while: author Stephen King purchased it. Hey, I was born in Stephen King's house! (He has since sold it, however.) It is amazing what you can find on the Internet.
GoogleReport.org has many uses besides history. I seem to be wrapped up in history - both family history and local history - so that is what I used. The site will also produce reports or links to reports on medical conditions, stock market information, and probably millions of other topics. Again, I didn't find it useful at finding ancestors. It probably will find famous people, but I doubt if any of my ancestors would qualify as "famous."
Whether looking for history of the town where your ancestors lived, information about your own past, medical information, or any of thousands of other topics, GoogleReport.org finds reports, not bits of information.
Make sure you also tell your children or grandchildren about this great homework assistant at http://www.googlereport.org.
