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Cliff Shaw had already founded and sold three companies in the genealogy space, all of which had to cope with the supersize competitor he confronted once again when he started Mocavo in 2011. Based in Boulder, Colo., his latest venture bills itself as "the world's largest genealogy search engine."
Genealogy. The study of generational knowledge. It’s a curiosity for most, a hobby for many, and an obsession for some. Yet despite the wide range of interest in the subject, it’s surprising that the market for it is so underdeveloped. Thankfully, Mocavo is looking to push the market even further ahead with its genealogically-focused search engine.
TechStars 2011 alum Mocavo has raised $4 million in its first round of funding in a bid to help people find their ancestors through its search engine, the company announced today.
Historical Record Storage and Sharing, iPhone and Android Apps, Discovery Stream.
Ryan Hunter Appointed Chief Operating Officer, Michael Leclerc Appointed Chief Genealogist.
Digital access is fueling the explosion in interest in family roots, says Cliff Shaw, who founded the genealogy-themed search engine Mocavo.com last year. It uses an algorithm that provides ancestry-centric results that may not show up in a Google search.
Mocavo is setting out to make genealogy "open, social, and automated". He explains that while there are existing services that use proprietary data sources, few take advantage of the abundance of information that's freely available on the web - information that Google often passes over.
"Dead people are neither fresh, nor popular." According to ancestry search startup, that's exactly the problem that we're facing when it comes to the different methods of search people are using today to find family history.
This announcement sounds promising - if a user searches www.Mocavo.com for my ancestral names, then they may find the persons I uploaded in my family tree (if I permit it - I will!).
To be sure, Mocavo still functions well as a genealogy search engine but now I think I need to describe Mocavo as "a genealogy search and matching service."
All my future genealogy searches will start on Mocavo," writes genealogy-technology enthusiast Dick Eastman. Launched earlier this year, Mocavo is a web search engine that speedily crawls hundreds of thousands of genealogy sites-especially great if you're researching a surname that's also a common word or corporate name.
Mocavo.com crawls websites similar to the way Google does, except it focuses on free genealogy content-making it easier for you to find relevant family history information on the web.
Mocavo.com is an excellent addition to the genealogical researcher's toolkit. I'm certain it will only become increasingly valuable (and popular) as more sites are indexed and users discover how tremendously useful this resource is.
I was very pleased when I had the chance a couple weeks ago to play with a new search developed by Cliff Shaw. Cliff is probably best known for bringing us a site called GenCircles.com years ago. His latest project is a free search engine called Mocavo.com... because Cliff Shaw built a fine and dandy new search for us, I found a new dead ancestor.
The market has been begging for it for over a decade. It's tough to say why others haven't tried, but there are definitely some serious technical hurdles to building a large-scale search engine, especially one as fast as Mocavo. Thanks to shows like 'Who Do You Think You Are,' interest in family history has exploded and it's undoubtedly the right time for us to do this.
Search engines like Google rank results by popularity, how recently the webpage was posted and how many times the webpage is linked to. But genealogy content may not be often linked to or refreshed regularly, so it may fall to the bottom of the rankings. Unlike other search engines, Mocavo.com's search results are indexed by people who chose exactly want the engine crawls. This allows users to tap into content that would be hard to find on Google.
