Many of you have contacted Maggie and I about the search engine being non-functional over the past few months. It's back to working.

What happened is that previous search engine software ceased running due to our server getting hacked into and corrupted beyond repair. My hosting provider offered wipe the server clean, reinstall the operating system, for a large fee. I refused, on the grounds that the server was pretty old anyways, and I could get a new server, with more power, for less money.

It was a long several months of migrating the website to the new server, without having control of the old server. I still had FTP access to the old server, however, and could transfer files to the new server. Except the old server kept locking up after transferring 20-30 files. I had to submit reboot requests into my hosting provider each time. The site has something like 40,000 files.

Talk about tedious.

But instead of reinstalling the same search engine software, I decided to chuck it in favor of Google's "AdSense for Search". It's the same Google search engine you're already familiar with. Seems to be more accurate, more intuitive, than what I had before.

And it doesn't have the old problem of forgetting your search query that my previous search engine software had.

The drawback with using Google is that it doesn't index new transcriptions and changes instantaneously like the old search engine did. New transcriptions probably take a day or two to index, compared to just one or two seconds with the old search. That's not too bad, though. But deletions and edits will probably take weeks, or months to index through Google.

I also removed some ads that didn't really monetize well, but added others. Overall, I think the pages are little more cleaner.

About all that's left to do at this point is to convert the homepage to the same page design the rest of the site uses.

I'll also try to blog here more often. I may not have much to talk about in the world of genealogy, and Maggie already does a great job of updating the "What's New" page. But I thought I'd chime in with some thoughts on technology, as it relates to genealogy, whatever news people send me, and some updates on what I'm up to.