An example of a confusing search result, FS Trees

Ray Gurganus

I frequently have confusing search results in the FS Trees, and have just had an example of a good one to send you. I go to the main FS Tree search, and search for First name = Donald, Last name = McKay, birth 1810 to 1810. In the first page of the search results I get many exact matches on the name, a few born in 1810, but many not. None are the one I am looking for.

If I add "Canada" as the birthplace, the one I'm looking for is the 4th result, born in 1810, but still below 2 that are not born in 1810. As this was an exact match with my criteria, one would think that even without "Canada", it would be on the first page, above any that are not born 1810? It is logical to prioritize matches for what is put in, above ones that don't match.

dontiknowyou

The Find tool in Family Tree never treats dates as exact. Sometimes that annoys me but I can see it has merit.

The Hints tool, on the other hand, is extremely sensitive to event dates. So, I use the Edit button a lot to review, correct, and standardize dates on profiles.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

We're not asking Find to treat dates as "exact". We'd just prefer a more sensible ordering of the results. Why is Donald McKay born 1 July 1810 (i.e., a perfect match to every single search term) listed 16th, below things like Donald Matheson Mc Kay christened 10 September 1810 (inexact name, christening rather than birth), or Donald Mc Kay born about 1805 (added space in name, not a match on birth)? How is the order of results being determined? Why are the not-quite matches sorting higher than the perfect matches?

For reference, here's the search: https://www.familysearch.org/search/tree/results?count=100&q.birthLikeDate.from=1810&q.birthLikeDate.to=1810&q.givenName=Donald&q.surname=McKay

dontiknowyou

The seemingly perfect match is not being scored as perfect. You can see this if you download the results of a search. The downloaded spreadsheet includes a column with the match score of each record, and is sorted by match score.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

The first 36 lines in the spreadsheet have identical scores -- but they do not match what I'm seeing in the search results. The first 13 rows all claim a "birthLikeDate" of 1810, and they all have a "fullName" of Donald Mckay (1-3 and 13), McKay (5-10 and 12), or Mc Kay (4, 11). In contrast, the search results have:

1. Donald Mc Kay, chr. 4 Jul 1810

2. Donald McKay, b. 15 Oct 1810

3. Donald McKay, b. about 15 Mar 1806

4. Donald McKay, b. about 1815

5. Donald Mckay, b. about 1806, chr. 9 Feb 1806

6. Donald McKay, b. about 1809

7. Donald Mc Kay, b. 24 Apr 1810

8. Donald Mc Kay, chr. 28 Mar 1810

9. Donald Mckay, b. about 1812

10. Donald McKay, b. from 1780 to 1810

11. Donald Mc Kay, b. about 1805

12. Donald McKay, b. about 1805

13. Donald Matheson Mc Kay, chr. 10 Sep 1810

The spreadsheet doesn't have "Matheson" in it anywhere. I don't know what data is in the spreadsheet, but it appears to have very little to do with the search results that one actually gets.

dontiknowyou

When scores are identical, as best I can tell the displayed results are in order of entry in some internal database, which is meaningless.