Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Mocavo.com Launches as World’s Largest Free Genealogy Search Engine

Industry breakthrough provides instant search results for billions of names, dates and places worldwide

BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mocavo.com™ (http://www.mocavo.com), a free search engine geared toward genealogists and people interested in learning more about their family history, launches today. Mocavo.com enables the search of more than 50 billion words - including billions of names, dates and places, all within fractions of a second. Mocavo.com fills an important industry need by providing the first large-scale, free search engine for family history research. Coupled with the speed and accuracy by which search results are produced, Mocavo.com represents a major technological breakthrough within the genealogy world.

Mocavo.com has already been met with critical acclaim by several industry experts. Dick Eastman, writer of Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter and a top blogger in the field, wrote, “All my future genealogy searches will start on Mocavo.com. I've been using the site for a while during its testing and have been very impressed. I suspect you will always have better luck searching for your own surnames of interest on Mocavo.com than on any other search engine.”

Randy Seaver, writer of the popular Genea-Musings blog, said, “Mocavo.com promises to be a genealogist's dream - a search engine focused on free online genealogy resources." Mr. Eastman’s and Mr. Seaver’s full reviews can be found at http://www.eogn.com and http://www.geneamusings.com, respectively.

Starting today, the general public can use Mocavo.com for free. Visitors to www.mocavo.com are simply required to type in the names of interest and click on Search. All related results from industry sources such as genealogy message boards, family trees, state and local historical societies, the Library of Congress, National Archives, Ellis Island, Find A Grave, the Internet Archive, various U.S. state archives, and many tens of thousands of genealogy sites built by individuals will be displayed. Similar to other search engines, Mocavo.com honors site owners by linking directly to their content.

Cliff Shaw, founder and CEO of Mocavo Inc., identifies the current trouble for genealogists and the solution that Mocavo.com provides, “Genealogy has always had the problem of information and potential clues being spread across thousands of disparate web sites and sources. Imagine a world where you have all of the Web’s free genealogy content at your fingertips within seconds. That is Mocavo.com.”

“Mocavo.com has the capacity to index every single piece of free genealogy content found anywhere on the web, and will be growing by leaps and bounds in the coming months,” said Mr. Shaw. “We expect Mocavo.com to shortly offer all of the web’s free genealogy information, searchable and accessible to all – something that has never been done before. It’s set to become the go-to search engine for every family history enthusiast.”

Mocavo Inc. is the brainchild of Cliff Shaw. Mr. Shaw is well known in the industry, having created four successful companies and many innovative technologies, including Smart Matching™, the most successful ancestor-matching algorithm. He created GenForum 14 years ago and it quickly grew to become the number one community for genealogists (now owned by Ancestry.com® (NASDAQ:ACOM)). In the early 2000’s, Mr. Shaw launched GenCircles and Family Tree Legends, becoming the number two family tree publishing site and number two family tree software package respectively (both are now owned by MyHeritage.com). More recently, Mr. Shaw launched the well-received BackupMyTree.com, the industry’s only automatic tree backup solution.

About Mocavo Inc.

Mocavo Inc. operates the world’s largest free genealogy search engine, Mocavo.com, giving genealogists access to the best free genealogy content on the web including billions of names, dates and places. Founded by industry veteran Cliff Shaw, and backed by prominent angel investor, David Cohen, (founder and CEO of TechStars), Mocavo.com seeks to index and make searchable all of the world’s free genealogy information. While Mocavo.com discovers new sites every day, some of the existing sites searchable on Mocavo.com include genealogy message boards, family trees, state and local historical societies, the Library of Congress, National Archives, Ellis Island, Find A Grave, the Internet Archive, various U.S. state archives, and many tens of thousands of genealogy sites built by individuals. For further information, visit http://www.mocavo.com.