Google Labs News: Site-Flavored Google Search.

This allows you to do personalized search. You can specify the categories that the topic you are searching is in.

This is a feature I was waiting for a long time. Whenever I search for "Roche" in google (or any other search engine) I used to get more sites on the company Roche, or news articles on it - but what I need was genealogical information and not a company information! This was something that people in the XML circles have been touting since the beginning, though I didn't see much come out of it.

So now I can specify my categories and generate a html that would ideally return you the results that you want. I tried it for genealogy, but didn't get what I expected.

I used these categories -

Home -> Family
Society -> Genealogy
Society -> History
Society -> Military

[If you are researching a specific region, you can add that too]

There was only one site flavored result on searching for Roche! This will take time to build up, I assume.