This online book project, established by Internet Archive, is similar to Google Books and allows you to view close to two million books online, or download a digitized version to your local computer. You'll find a quick link to the new Internet Archive Text Search at the bottom of Live Roots search results in the section labeled "Available Partner Services". This search, along with all of the other integrated real-time searches, allows you to expand your genealogy search beyond the Live Roots catalog.

A relative newcomer to the genealogy marketplace, Archives.com has been aggregating a variety of vital record sources. Today, I added a search preview for the site, along with cataloging the various resources they have collected so far. There is currently no method for searching a specific resource, only record types (birth/marriage/death/etc). Last year, they launched an article feature called Expert Series -- a variety of well-respected genealogists have been contributing articles. All of the articles have also been cataloged, and I'll be tracking the feature for any new additions.

Would you like to be able to search Live Roots regardless of where you may have browsed to on the Internet? You're probably familiar with that small search box in the upper right corner of your browser; well that's called the Search Provider box, and additional search engines can be added. Yesterday, I created the XML file necessary to add Live Roots to that search box area. Click here to add the Live Roots search provider. Once added, you can select Live Roots and initiate a search at any time, from anywhere!

You can now view results from the Record Search pilot from within the Live Roots search experience. The FamilySearch Record Search pilot include millions of indexed records, and is expanding each month. When you perform a search in Live Roots, you will see a link to the FamilySearch Record Search feature in the "Available Partner Services" section. You also have the ability to search a specific collection within the Record Search pilot from the corresponding resource page. Resources from the pilot are cataloged in Live Roots as soon as they are posted online.

Happy New Year, everyone. 2010 is off to a great start, as more genealogical resources continue to be added to the Live Roots catalog every week. Today, I rewrote the Surname Results section of the search engine to be more efficient and to expand upon the phonetic algorithm used to display alternate spellings of the surnames you searched for. Prior to this update, the search engine only offered a single alternative per surname, however, now the system will attempt to offer multiple. This is especially helpful when searching through older documents where phonetic spellings of names were more common.

Another busy week, as we've added the following collections to the Live Roots catalog: British Newspapers (1800-1900), Ericson Books, Boyd Publishing, the Berlin Area Historical Society, and author, Dr. George K. Schweitzer. The July and August updates for the BYU-Family History Archive were also added.

This week the individual titles included in Ancestry's U.S. Obituary Collection were cataloged (AND geocoded) into Live Roots, making it easier to locate location specific resources in this collection of over 20 million obituaries from more than 3,000 newspapers. Also, the unique Lost Faces collection of vintage family photograph albums was cataloged--over 60 albums of identified family photos and growing. You are now able to Follow/Share/etc. the geographic locations in the Navigate feature. And lastly (yes, it's been a busy week already), several dozen postcard images were added to the Live Roots collection. Postcards are a great resource for being able to see the buildings of the institutions our ancestors may have (sometimes involuntarily) attended.

Today catalogs were added from the following groups: Picton Press, Broadfoot Publishing, Arphax Publishing, GoldBug Maps, [Loyalist, Paul] Bunnell Genealogy Books, Gorin Genealogical Publishing and IllinoisHistory.com. In addition, this week I've fixed close to 500 broken links (mainly sites that have left rootsweb.com, aol.com, compuserve.com and/or geocities.com).

Roots Television has released a video interview about Live Roots, featuring Illya D'Addezio, President and Founder of Genealogy Today. In this video, Matthew Poe talks with Illya about the site's new offerings. The interview was conducted at the Southern California Genealogical Jamboree in Burbank, California.

Watch and listen to the video at http://www.rootstelevision.com/players/player_conferences3.php?bcpid=6933799001&bclid=27965007001&bctid=29865721001

The entire newspaper collection from NewspaperARCHIVE.com has been cataloged into Live Roots, which added close to 4,000 new resources -- all with locations so they appear properly in the Navigate feature. In addition, I recently added "not" logic to the main Live Roots search. To negate a word in your query, place an exclamation point before the word (no space). For example, "johnson !county" would mean "show me all listings containing the word JOHNSON but NOT containing the word COUNTY." Keep in mind, the search is only as good as the listings in the catalog, so if a listing is about Johnson County, but doesn't include the word "county" in the listing, it will still appear.

I posted the latest catalog update from the BYU Family History Archives project, about another 1,000 books. This is a wonderful project, similar to Google Books, but focused on resources of interest to genealogists. Also, posted yesterday, an update from FamilyOldPhotos.com, Teri Brown's growing collection of searchable group photos.

In conjunction with the Southern California Genealogical Jamboree, I released some project management tools to help visitors keep track and organize the genealogical resources that they discover while using the search engine. Throughout Live Roots, registered members will now see Follow, Comment, Record and Share buttons. For more information, please read "Live Roots Search Experience, Release Two".

With more genealogists posting photos online, it only makes sense to include sites like Flickr and Picasa Web Albums to the Live Roots project. In addition to photos of ancestors, you may stumble upon cemetery images of tombstones, or historical buildings where your ancestors lived, worked, worshiped or played. Both of these new search interfaces can be found on the real-time search page. Also, thanks go to Wevonneda Minis, who I met at the NGS conference in Raleigh, for her nice article on Live Roots, "Search engine for genealogists."

I've added an "Advanced" link to the small green search box that appears on every page of the LiveRoots.com website. This will lead you to the search tool that I developed for the iGoogle gadget, allowing you to search any of the resources accessible through Live Roots. Also, if you are a FamilyTreeMaker user, check out this blog post by Russ Worthington about adding LiveRoots.com as a custom search option. UPDATE: The iGoogle gadget that I created is now also available in the orkut online community application directory (search for "Live Roots").

Additional integrated real-time searches include YouTube (videos) and RootsWeb Search. There is also a new feature on the site called "Discover More Genealogy (within Live Roots)" that guides you to all of the feeds (blogs, podcasts, video channels and tweeters) that are currently followed. You'll find this feature below the Roots Discover option, and throughout the site whenever you are looking at a feed. We were mentioned recently on DearMyrtle's blog (see "LiveRoots.com: saving time for online researchers"), in Tamura Jones' coverage of Facebook applications (see "Facebook Genealogy") and Randy Seaver has been writing a very interesting multi-part review of Live Roots (see "Using LiveRoots.com - Post 1" and "Post 2").

I've expanded the options for several of the real-time search partners, including Ancestry.com, Footnote.com, Genealogy Bank and World Vital Records. You are now able to filter searches by adding given (first) names, regions, year (or range) and keywords. The options currently vary between partners, but I am working with each partner to expand each preview feature. Once you enter the options for one partner, you are able to click on the preview links for the other partners without have to re-enter them.