Home› Welcome to the FamilySearch Community!› Suggest an Idea

Full text search for German speaking users

WSeelentag
WSeelentag ✭✭✭
July 13, 2022 edited July 13, 2022 in Suggest an Idea

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

familysearch-search-gallen1.jpg

and am shown 10 potential hits - likely the first 10, not all potential hits.

I then click on search and get

familysearch-search-gallen2.jpg

just 2 hits - one already on the above list, and another one.

My workaround is Google with the "site" specification:

familysearch-search-gallen3.jpg

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:

familysearch-search-gallen4.jpg

but then listing only 12:

familysearch-search-gallen5.jpg

… 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?

Tagged:
2
2
Up Down
2 votes

· Last Updated July 14, 2022

Comments

  • WSeelentag
    WSeelentag ✭✭✭
    July 14, 2022 edited July 14, 2022

    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:

    familysearch-full-text-search.jpg

    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.

    0
  • PABulfinch
    PABulfinch mod
    July 14, 2022

    WOW! You really did some research here, Mr. Seelentag!! It was really fascinating reading all of this. Thank you for sharing, PaulaAnn 😀

    0
  • WSeelentag
    WSeelentag ✭✭✭
    July 14, 2022

    Well - now the question is: when will "someone" do something about it?

    0
  • WSeelentag
    WSeelentag ✭✭✭
    July 15, 2022 edited July 15, 2022

    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):

    familysearch-full-text-search-20220715.jpg

    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" 😊.

     

    1
Clear
No Groups Found

Categories

  • 30K All Categories
  • 24.2K FamilySearch Help
  • 125 Get Involved
  • 2.7K General Questions
  • 442 FamilySearch Center
  • 461 FamilySearch Account
  • 4.4K Family Tree
  • 3.4K Search
  • 4.7K Indexing
  • 637 Memories
  • 6.5K Temple
  • 322 Other Languages
  • 34 Community News
  • 6.6K Suggest an Idea
  • Groups