Full text search for German speaking users
IMHO desirable would be a user friendly full text search feature, preferably for a specified research group. With "user friendly" I mean easy to find, correct (which includes complete) and reproducible. Here's my experience so far:
I enter a search term in the search field on the start page
and am shown 10 potential hits - likely the first 10, not all potential hits.
I then click on search and get
just 2 hits - one already on the above list, and another one.
My workaround is Google with the "site" specification:
This gives me 15 hits in total, not including the above two. "öffentlich einsehbare Filme entsperren" has not been posted in a research group, but in "Verbesserungsvorschläge" (= Suggest an Idea - but with different posts, depending on the language region you log in). "Wer kann Günther Mowes helfen" doesn't even contain my search term!
So this language difference gave me an idea - try the familysearch search option - but switch to English first … promising me 25 hits:
but then listing only 12:
… none of the 2 I get offered when I search from the start page in German!???
Let me quote my first sentence: IMHO desirable would be a user friendly full text search feature, preferably for a specified research group. With "user friendly" I mean easy to find, correct (which includes complete) and reproducible. What am I missing?
Comments
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I just notice that instead of the "promised" 25 hits I do not get 12 hits (as mentioned above) - but only 6: Didn't realise this immediately, but the hits "1-10" display only 4 (plus the 2 under "11-20"). So I compared the results:
So we have at least 17 discussions with "gallen" (for St.Gallen) in the text - only 6 are found with the search feature of familysearch (remember: none when logged in as German speaking user), incl. 2 which are not found by google - nothing familysearch can do about the latter. But I suggest an approvement for the majority of 9 discussions not found … plus solving the problem for German speaking users, of course.
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WOW! You really did some research here, Mr. Seelentag!! It was really fascinating reading all of this. Thank you for sharing, PaulaAnn 😀
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Well - now the question is: when will "someone" do something about it?
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Sorry for the typo: I suggest an approvement for the majority of 9 discussions not found should have read improvement, of course. And this seems to have happened (see last column):
8 of the 11 "missing" hits were found, when I just did another run (familysearch only, not google) - in 7 of them the search word was found in a comment rather that the first post in the discussion. A potential explanation could be (I haven't checked this) that the search algorithm was improved to include comments as well, rather than first posts only.
Also another 4 discussions (again comments) were found, which google had missed. Interesting here: one of them not in a research group, but in "Suggest an Idea". Now this is new (to me): so far I had seen in the German region no hits in research groups, in the English region only hits in research groups. Again: has the search algorithm be modified?
If that is the case: whoever has done it - thank you 😍!
This would just leave to implement this algorithm for German speaking users as well. To enable group specific searches will likely be more difficult … but still a "nice to have" 😊.
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