Search Engine Bug: Dates do not appear to be ordering properly in search results list
Dear Record Search Team:
While playing around with the new Search page format in Beta, I noticed the following which is completely reproducible in the current production version of Search that I see.
I tried out the very basic search of First Name: Johannes, Birth Place: Stord, Hordaland, Norway (not exact), Birth Years: 1815 to 1820, generating this Search URL: https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?q.givenName=johannes&q.birthLikePlace=stord%2C%20hordaland%2C%20norway&q.birthLikeDate.from=1815&q.birthLikeDate.to=1820&count=20&offset=0&m.defaultFacets=on&m.queryRequireDefault=on&m.facetNestCollectionInCategory=on
Here are the first 20 results:
As can be seen, the first twenty records all have just the first name of Johannes, some with a second first name. Since these are all the same, they should not influence the order of the results.
The places are all Stord, Hordaland, Norway, so this would also not be expected to change the weighted order of the result list.
I would expect that that would then leave just the date as the determining factor for the order of results. However, this is not the case.
Nine of the twenty results on this first page have birth years that fall between 1815 and 1820. However, instead of clustering at the top, they are scattered down the page. This is clearly not a case of there being no better results that match the search criteria and so giving heavier weight to non-date items.
Why is this happening? Can it be fixed? Is there something in the underlying data of the records that are interspersed between the expected record that is causing problems? They do all the the format of having the birth date given as just Month, four digit Day, and no year.
Thank you for taking a look at this.