The Genealogy Journey

The newbie genealogist's resource for books, mags, databases, and -- of course -- any free research stuff to be found on the Internet.

Monday, January 30, 2006

MyHeritage.com -- A Powerful New Genealogy Tool

One of the great things about a blog is that complete strangers will contact you with helpful information. (Of course, some will also contact you with lewd suggestions, but that’s why Blogger has the comment moderation feature.) The other day I received an email from Hagit Katzenelson letting me know about a new site that’s currently in its beta stage. (That's programmer speak for, "We haven't worked all the kinks out yet.") The site is:

http://www.myheritage.com/FP/Company/myHeritageSearch.php?s=1&u=g0&lang=EN&restore&category=4

Note: When the site is more open to the public, I’m sure the URL will be just http://www.myheritage.com/.

MyHeritage.com promises to be a huge timesaver because it searches across more than 400 (and growing) reliable genealogy databases worldwide. Even better, it can search for up to 10 spelling variations at one time. Other features include the ability to:

  • Store and annotate search results for later research.

  • Save your searches and schedule them to occur automatically so that you’re notified of new findings.
Some features, like the “Community” tab, aren’t running yet, but MyHeritage.com has a really cool feature that makes up for that: a face recognition search. You can upload your picture and have MyHeritage.com compare it to both family and celebrity faces.

I’ll admit I couldn’t get this feature to return any results, but once it’s bug-free I’ll try it again:

http://www.myheritage.com/FP/Company/face_recognition.php?s=1&u=g0&lang=EN&restore&category=1

(If you get this to work, leave a comment and let me know about your results!)

One thing I’m worried about is that I don’t see how MyHeritage.com plans to support their business. I didn’t see any obvious signs of advertising support, so I hope they’re not offering free access for a bit and changing to subscription mode later. Of course, other companies do this all the time and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that – I would just be disappointed if it were true.

~Mary Kaye

1 Comments:

At 3:54 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Any idea when we'll be able to go to the MyHeritage.com web site?

 

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