Many couples don’t (or forget to) password protect their wedding websites. As a result, web crawlers are invited to the party. They index these pages and make them visible in search engines. When I realized the sheer magnitude of this trove of public wedding data, I used it as an ongoing resource to streamline and simplify key decisions as I planned my own wedding.

My partner and I began earnestly planning our wedding in February knowing we wanted a destination weekend. We started where most do: where and when? Eventually we narrowed our list down to two regions: Mexico and Hawaii. Progress, but still a daunting task from afar. That’s when the following Google search made life a lot easier:

(site:zola.com OR site:theknot.com OR site:withjoy.com) wedding website [name of city]

Here we’re asking Google for:

• Pages only from the three major wedding website companies.
• Pages including the term wedding website, keywords that are a fixture on all wedding sites generated by these companies (either in the page title or on main page).
• Pages that include [city], filtering down results to a specific city. All wedding sites have a location.

For example, a search today for wedding websites in Mexico City:

(site:zola.com OR site:theknot.com OR site:withjoy.com) wedding website mexico city

Yields a whopping 19,000+ results. All real people, real weddings:

From here I experimented with keywords to further refine results in a city or quickly jump across cities. In minutes we answered questions which would have otherwise taken days:

1. What are the common and lesser known venues in [city]?
2. How popular is [venue]? We got a relative, though rough, sense of demand for venues across town and across time.
3. For couples who had their wedding at [venue], which wedding hotel did they choose? How did they organize guest transport? Where did they have their welcome dinner? A normal-ish distribution emerged, with most weddings conforming the mean and the rest as outliers.
4. Some example searches:
   • Weddings at the Hard Rock Hotel in Cancun
   • Weddings at the Kahala Hotel & Resort in Oahu

A particular useful keyword in this exercise was sangeet. A sangeet is a common element in many North Indian (and most Indian-American) weddings. It’s essentially a welcome party the night before the wedding full of color and performances. Appending sangeet to search queries effectively filters results to “weddings where one or both people are Indian”. Combing through Indian destination websites helped answer even more specific questions like:

1. Which venues have experience with the nuances of an Indian wedding? For example, if there’s been an Indian wedding at [venue] they likely permit a live fire.
2. Has there been an Indian wedding in [second tier city]? If so, there is probably some decent Indian wedding infrastructure there, like a caterer.

It’s incredible what some clever Googling can get you without any contacts in a foreign place. It’s now August and we are well into planning. We landed on Cabo. Invites are sent, vendors are mostly locked, and our own site is complete. The one thing I made sure not to forget: a password.

Footnote: There is a forbidden, sleuthy feeling to visiting these often personal sites. They are not intended for the world to see. Companies need to help non-technical users better understand the implications of their choices. There is a lot they can do.