Have You Tried Mocavo Search Engine? It's Free Now

  Yes I know, free is good. The Mocavo search engine is a genealogy focused search engine. Google is great, especially if you know a few advanced search engine tips. But don't exclude Mocavo when you search.

  Here is a direct link to setup your account or search.Mocavo is a business and has to currently host their website on 500 servers. Man, that's a lot of traffic. My wife hates me to pay for one, ha ha Kathleen. So they do have a business model, but like many companies has an enhanced version which is worth considering. Below is an email I received from the owner of Mocavo. You can get a sense for the good motives of the founder as well as his decision to make the bulk of our needs free. He also states a case that we could be kind to help by our upgrade:

The email:

Hi Larry,

When I founded Mocavo several years ago, I had been dreaming of building this company for over a decade. I wanted to bring all of the world's existing genealogy information under one roof – and then start hosting even more content online for free. We just needed a business model to support those goals and sustain the costs associated with hosting billions of records and images. We've finally figured out how to do it, and it's with unbelievable excitement that I can finally say: When Mocavo brings content online, it becomes free forever. Let me be clear – I didn't just say free for now, I said free forever. We're making a radical departure from the status quo of how content is controlled in the genealogy industry.

But wait! Mocavo is a business. How can you afford to do this? 

Our paid product, Mocavo Gold (formerly Mocavo Plus), charges for automated searching, the ability to run global searches across all the databases on Mocavo, and a number of other great features. You're paying for speed and convenience to make discoveries faster, but we're not charging you for the content. This means that you can search the Texas Death Index (or tens of thousands of other databases) to your heart's content without paying a dime. If you want to search them all at once, join our revolution and upgrade to Mocavo Gold.

How can I trust that content on Mocavo will be free forever?

We are committed to free genealogy unlike any other company – it's part of our history. When I founded GenForum in 1997, I said the site would be free forever. To this day, it's still free. Everything else I've done in the industry is now free (GenCircles, Family Tree Legends, BackupMyTree). When we announced our partnership with FreeBMD earlier this year, we also announced that we had joined the Open Genealogy Alliance (and we are still the only genealogy company to have done so). Openness is in our DNA and we'll continue to demonstrate our commitment to the cause.

We need your help to fuel the revolution!

Even though we don't charge for content, we still need to pay for our 500+ servers and the employees who improve our product everyday. By deciding to upgrade your account to Mocavo Gold, you're supporting our mission to bring the world's genealogical information online, for free.

We have some exciting things we're working on for the community that we'll announce over the next month or so:

• Starting today and every day, we'll be releasing more than 1,000 entirely new databases into our search engine. And we'll do this every day from here on out (as long as we can find the data, we're going to keep bringing it online for free). You'll know because we'll send you updates on all the great new stuff we've added. These databases become free to the public forever. Browse some of our tens of thousands of existing databases here: http://www.mocavo.com/records
• You'll see us begin to release more of our software as open source projects, in an effort to provide the genealogy community with the tools it needs to bring more content online for free. Tell us what you need to get this content organized and accessible – and we'll help you host it and bring it online with our commitment that it stays free forever.
• There's a lot of work to do! If you'd like to help us in our mission, please email volunteers@mocavo.com so we can all start bringing more of our history online – to be free forever.

I founded Mocavo with the belief that information wants to be free. With your help, free genealogy can make a serious foothold in this industry. We've got an incredible ability with Mocavo to finally do it right, and I'm asking you to join me in this mission. Over the past 10 years, I've dreamed of putting all the world's historical information online for free to benefit the community and future generations.

Join us as we build a new future for genealogy, one free database at a time. The Internet was the first revolution in genealogy – let's work together to build the next one.