Radloff Statistics

It's amazing how many Radloffs you can find using a search engine. The results from the search engines vary from none to a few to over 2000. It is interesting to see how many hits each search engine gets. It just goes to show you that each search engine keeps track of different things and some are 'better' than others. I say 'better' because I'm not sure if they really are better or whether or not some specialize in certain types of categories. Also, some of the numbers will be off as mergers took place between dot com companies and resources were combined or eliminated.

The bottom line is if you are using these search engines for tracing your family history, certain ones might be better than others. But don't forget to search them all. I've found some pages on some of the smaller search engines which aren't even mentioned (or at least I've not found them) in the 1000's of hits on the main line search engines.

As for the web pages they include genealogy pages, personal pages, telephone indices, sales pages, sports pages, legal cases, sporting events, entertainment pages, and yes even a poronographic page. To see what these links looked like in 1998 go to my web history page's links page. (NOTE: none of these links have been verified or checked so many may be broken. I've not updated them, verified them nor do I intend to.)

How many Radloff's are out there in CyberSpace. The following table is based on the results of various search engines. As I collect data, I'll add new search engines and track the results over time.

Type of Search	Search Location	Number of Hits for 1 Jan 2001	Number of Hits for 30 May 1999	Number of Hits for 10 Nov 1998	Number of Hits for 31 Aug 1998
World Wide Web	HotBot	4900	930	950	945
	Google	9750	n/c	n/c	n/c
	Alta Vista	4448	1959	1795	1936
	Yahoo	1150	0	1	1
	GoTo.com	total not given	240	10	10
	Thunderstone	0	37	28	28
	Lycos's Top 5%	2	0	0	0
	WebCrawler	33	13	14	0
	What U Seek	45	0	2	0
	Magellan	520	13	14	18
	Lycos	7616	total not given	0	91
	InfoSeek now go.com	1492	896	10	486
	Excite Web Search	520	548	436	472
	PlanetSearch	now 12 search engines many of which are listed above	164	173	176
Email Searches	Four 11	see yahoo below	n/c	0	140
	Internet Address Finder	0	0	n/c	42
	Welcome to WhoWhere?!	no total given	366	n/c	93
	Yahoo! People Search	72	50	138	139
	Switchboard	39	36	n/c	31
Address Books	BigBookDirectorySearch	893	n/c	n/c	700
	DatabaseAmericaPeople Finder (now InfoUSA)	requires State selection	n/c	n/c	n/c
	TheUltimateWhite Pages	has several search engines	n/c	n/c	n/c
	World'sphonebooks	broken down by country	n/c	n/c	n/c