Family Search 'Search' feature
Doing my own family history work, and serving as a Family History and Temple consultant at our Stake Family Research Center, I have been frustated with the Family Search 'search' feature. The results come up on the left of the screen, and any info that you want to put in your search is on the right. That works. My frustration is that I can put in a name only, and get 10,000 search results....OR...I can fine tune my search with places, dates, and family relationships....and still come up with nearly the same amount of search results. The dates, the names, the places, can still be wildly off from what I put in my search request. I don't know how to fix this, as I'm not a computer person. I do know that it's become so time-wasting that I do all of my search work on ancestry.com. We even recommend that for our patrons at the Family Research Center. That's sad, especially if the patron is new to FamilySearch and wants to have a great experience. There must be a way to significantly fine tune our searching if we put in narrow parameters, but currently it is not working. I have some unusual names in my family, and even filling in all of the info it brings in 100's of unrelated hits. For now, I do my searching on ancestry.com. Every few weeks, I check back to see if Family Search has improved it's search options. I've been doing Family History for 40+ years, and love it!! Just hoping the searching/sourcing can be improved. It use to be more user friendly.
Answers
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@KimerlyWagstaff Thank you for taking time to submit your concerns. They have been passed on the the appropriate manager.
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I find the biggest challenge with the search engines, both on the Internet in general and on FamilySearch, stem from two facts: the databases have become so huge and the search routines try to be far too helpful. When was the last time you searched Google and got less than 100,000,000 results?
But there is hope!
It does take an investment of time and a willingness to learn but the FamilySearch search engine does have a lot of powerful functions that help a lot. It also has weakness that you need to understand, the biggest one being problems in place names created this past year by an auto-standardization routine.
The most important pointers are that it is far more useful to search a single collection or a selected set of collections rather than the entire database, that because of the weighting system for results if you do not see any useful results on the first or second pages of results it is usually not useful to go any farther and it is better to adjust the search, and that the various filters greatly increase the precision of results as long as you are careful about the place name filters.
But is is very hard to speak in generalities. If you could post a specific example of a search you want to do and the results you hope to see, I would be happy to demonstrate a search based on that example.
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See my comment on this other thread: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/488138#Comment_488138 for a possible explanation of what you're seeing. When you add search parameters, it actually increases the number of matches, because FS now interprets them as "either" rather than as "both". (It used to be, FS did "both", whereas Ancestry did "either".)
You can work around this shortcoming to some degree by using filters, and/or by restricting your search to a particular film or record type.
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I've had the same complaint like this. It was answered by Julia, fortunately. If you read it, it might help!
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