Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

Have you tried Bing yet? This is Microsoft’s new search tool, designed to finally compete with Google. It’s actually quite good. Whether it will be able to compete with Google is a matter of intellectual debate.

Search engines are good for genealogists. Most often we enter our ancestors names into search engines and often find all sorts of interesting leads. Many people have found My Family Research Page that way, and I have had great success through that medium (letting others come to me), connecting me to over 50 previously unknown relatives on many of my lines of research.

When you have a webpage, you want to be able to be found. Often, the “experts” tell you to “optimize” your web pages so the search engines can find you. That’s hogwash. All you have to do is put good content up, not try to hide anything, and you will be found.

As I’m interested in “Genealogy Software”, and I periodically enter that term into different search engines and see what comes out. I also like to see where my GenSoftReviews page ranks in that search. Currently on Google, it is 13th, is 18th on Bing, and unless I missed it does not seem to be in the top 100 on Yahoo. I guess that’s not bad for not trying.

But what really blows me away is this Behold website. I’m not sure how, but as of now, if you simply search for the word “Behold” on the various search engines, you’ll find beholdgenealogy.com number 10 on Google, number 4 on Yahoo, number 5 on Bing. This is out of tens of millions of results.

I find this quite odd. Obviously, I don’t mind that result, but if I were going to a search engine and looking for the word “Behold”, I doubt if I would be expecting a program for genealogy to come up in the top results.

But this does assure me that Behold was a good name for my program, and that it’s getting well-embedded into the Internet. Soon I’ll make the next step and hopefully get it embedded into the genealogy world as well.

My talk tonight about Behold to 40 people of the EEGS (East European Genealogical Society) here in Winnipeg went better than well. The audience was really taken by my talk of what`s wrong with genealogy software, and how Behold is doing it the right way.

Other genealogy software are all big black boxes where you deposit your data, entered inefficiently via tedius forms. To see your data, you generate inadequate reports that don`t display everything and then force you to bounce between your reports and input forms to manually fix or add to your data. Repeat and continue ad infinitum.

I surveyed the crowd. 90% had computers. About 70% used genealogy software, mostly Family Tree Maker, Legacy, Brother`s Keeper and PAF. There was one Unix GRAMPS user and one Mac iFamily user. Only about one quarter of them knew what GEDCOM was.

I took them through Behold step by step. I swear I could hear a pin drop. The next thing I knew and an hour and a half had passed and it was time to wrap up and questions. The biggest disappointment was that Behold cannot edit yet. The biggest surprise was that Behold has free upgrades for life.

Talk to any one of those 40 people, and you will now find them intrigued by Behold`s promising solution to making their genealogy data usable.

Days like today are great to get my motivation going.

Now back to making Behold the reality I expect it to be.

Every Spring, there seems to be a host of interruptions that slow the progress of Behold somewhat. April was no exception.

First there was the tragic end of my XP machine and the purchase and week-long setup of a new Vista machine, which I just love. Then there was income taxes to do.

Our newspaper stock market contest and The Financial Post contest took a few minutes each night to analyze, plus they are leading me to an actual stock market methodology I am implementing for myself that may actually produce good returns almost mechanically.

Spring comes with snow melt. Snow melt shows yard. Yard means yardwork, like the branches I have to get rid of, and the raking, and the backyard cleanup. Ugh. Winter’s better.

Spring also means Spring cleaning, and my daughters have pushed us to finally clean out the basement.

Family is the best thing in life. We get together with my wife’s family every Friday and with my family every Sunday. Mom passed away last year, but Dad’s getting along well. Family always takes precedence over everything else, and Spring seems to have the most school and family happenings.

My day job is at its annual busy time. Now as a manager, my job is not to do any work, but to coordinate, oversee, advise, teach, and administer. Deadlines are deadlines, and there is an art in getting others to do a quality job by giving them responsibility and accountability. And lunch hour squash three times a week is a relaxing necessity that I hope I can continue indefinitely.

Another project that I’ve deferred for years is to make my Jewish Heritage Centre’s website e-commerce-able, and to get their digitized material up there and available. I’ll continue working on that but Behold will have a higher priority.

And I’ll be giving a talk about Behold on May 20th to the East European Genealogical Society. Anyone in Winnipeg who wants to meet me should feel free to come.

I was up until 3 a.m. trying to get my old XP computer running again. I did and to my surprise, I was able to get it working again normally. Pheh! No way I’m going back. Tonight as I write this, I was wiping the XP and recovering the initial XP installation with the goal of donating it to my Heritage Centre. But no … five hours and all sorts of problems/glitches/troubles trying to do it.

At least it gave me time to write this post.