MyHeritage Releases SuperSearch

MyHeritage, a popular family network on the web, announced the official launch of SuperSearch, a powerful new family history search engine for helping families around the world discover historical records and long-lost relatives. Packed with international sources of historical content and family trees, SuperSearch is capable of searching billions of records within seconds. With a simple and contemporary user experience, clever search features, a massive library of content including one billion global family tree profiles, the world’s largest collection of historical newspapers, and flexible pay-as-you-go or subscription payment options, SuperSearch raises the bar and provides new value and choice for family history fans.

With more than 63 million registered users, MyHeritage has become a trusted home on the web for families wishing to explore their family history, share memories and stay connected. The official launch of SuperSearch, which has been in Beta since April 2012, reaffirms MyHeritage’s position as a leading provider of historical records, following the company’s recent acquisition of WorldVitalRecords and FamilyLink, appointment of former Footnote.com Founder and CEO Russ Wilding to lead content growth, and initiative to provide a free searchable index for the 1940 U.S. Census.

Available in 38 languages, SuperSearch is a multilingual family history search engine, breaking down geographical and language barriers in genealogy research. SuperSearch automatically translates and searches possible initials, synonyms and spelling variations. For example a search for William will also catch Bill, Vilhelm, Guillaume, Guglielmo and many other variations, even when written in other alphabets such as Russian or Hebrew. This increases the chances of finding valuable information within the huge hoards of content on MyHeritage without requiring users to try such variations themselves.

With a powerful mix of historical records and user-generated information in family trees on MyHeritage, SuperSearch helps family history enthusiasts break through brick walls in their research and add color to their family history. The more than 4 billion records on MyHeritage provide worldwide coverage, with strong collections in the USA, UK, Ireland, Australia and Canada. Some record collections are exclusive to MyHeritage, and all this is augmented by content licensed from important third-party databases. Users can find birth, marriage, death, burial, census, military, immigration, yearbooks and other types of records, and view scans of original documents. SuperSearch includes the world’s largest historical newspaper collection (currently about 120 million pages dating back to the 18th century), the 1930 and 1940 US census records, all UK censuses between 1841 and 1901 and the content from MyHeritage-owned family history websites,www.worldvitalrecords.com&esheet=50321941&lan=en-US&anchor=WorldVitalRecords&index=5&md5=ad28fccf899798d63c06d732e03b054e"> WorldVitalRecords andwww.familylink.com&esheet=50321941&lan=en-US&anchor=FamilyLink&index=6&md5=b9fa746489f9bae8803728d7715e9b48"> FamilyLink.

“SuperSearch represents a watershed innovation in the family history industry,” said Founder and CEO of MyHeritage, Gilad Japhet. “It transforms family history into an experience that is more global, accessible and engaging than ever before. Within a few minutes, you can unravel family mysteries - discover your great-aunt on a passenger list to Ellis Island, find your long-lost branch of the family in a family tree in Brazil or locate the photo of your great-grandfather’s gravestone in England. Complementing our expertise in community family tree building, SuperSearch helps fulfill our goal of connecting families to each other and to their past, and does so in full color, with photos, videos and documents. We're adding millions of new records and family tree profiles every day, which, together with the imminent launch of Record Matching, makes SuperSearch an indispensable tool for family history fans around the world.”

SuperSearch features:

• Easily search for historical records of any person by first name and/or last name, with optional dates or places.
• Search also by keywords, events, relationships and other advanced criteria.
• Find people without even knowing their last names, for example, find three brothers in the same family using only their first names and relationship as siblings, or find all people born on a certain date or in a certain town.
• Run a global search to cover all data collections at once, or drill down to search only in one collection or one category.
• SuperSearch is smart enough to figure out the likely gender of the person you're trying to find.
• Choose between a mode that shows all results, and a summary mode that shows the count of matches from each collection.
• Results arrive fast, typically within a second, ranked by relevance.
• Refine results by collection or by any other common criteria.