Problems with dropdown list for place names

Paul W

Firstly, this "new" feature is only appearing intermittently - one day it's there, the next day (or session) it's gone.

Secondly, it is subject to inconsistent behaviour when I include a wildcard in an inputted place name. If I just leave it at that (i.e., don't select a name from the drop-down list), sometimes it will work as with the Search page without the drop-down feature - producing the "expected" results for, say all names including "Suffolk". However, clicking on Search on other occasions changes (as just now) my Suffolk* input to "East Suffolk, England, United Kingdom".

Is this still in the testing stage - hence the differing Search pages I'm getting from day to day, and the inconsistent behaviour after I hit "Search".

(Just tried it again and, yes, the first time it retained my suffolk* input, but when I repeated this, "East Suffolk, England, United Kingdom" appeared in the place name box!)

DavidJohnson

Hear is the URL Link that will help you Navigating, Adding and Editing, Standardization of Dates and Places on Family Tree • FamilySearch

I hope this help you out.

Gordon Collett

@Paul W I finally had what you describe for the Search and Find place field show up but only a few times. It did seem the few chances I had to test it out, that if I did exactly what we can do everywhere else, click on the red text that was what I had just typed in as the first choice in the drop down, and refused to pick a standard from the list, the search behaved as if no standard had been selected and just used what I put. Was able to use a wildcard once and it worked. Picking that top line also seemed to dismisse that overly helpful feature for days.

I do hope that when or if this change is stable, that picking a standard is left as an option, not a requirement.

Paul W

@DavidJohnson

I don't usually have problems in making searches. I have really posted the issue here (rather than under the "Search" category) as a way of politely suggesting the engineers should stick with just the one Search page (the "old" one) in the production version and work on the new version within Beta until they can sort out the current issues.

Áine Ní Donnghaile

I've encountered the same issue, @Paul W, and it has been intermittent for me as well.

Paul W

Another point is that the drop-down list is fine for use in Family Tree - where place names can be selected to create the correct standardized location - but not in a search for sources. Many indexed records have been standardized (through the auto-standardization exercise) to the wrong location. I have found others to contain invalid characters (parenthesis, etc.) as part of the place name, so I just don't think this idea (of choosing a set place name from a list) is going to work well for use at https://www.familysearch.org/search/

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Unfortunately, the whole point to the autostandardization mess was to switch place and date searches away from text-based to entity-based searching, so I'm sure the change will eventually be consistent and permanent, but at the current rate, I don't think we will be able to do any sort of useful searching by place on FamilySearch in this decade. The database is simply too badly corrupted, and the search interface is too unintuitive and broken.

One reason I call it "unintuitive" is that our webbrowsers and most websites have trained us to expect certain behaviors from "autocomplete"-type functions, but neither the Places tool nor the standards drop-downs follow those conventions. For example, it's only natural to expect that if I've typed 13 out 14 letters correctly, the matching place should be listed, right? Well, it isn't, on FamilySearch Places.

I have to finish typing the entire placename in order for it to show up.

The standards-dropdown algorithm has different faults: for example, I can finish typing "Brighton" all the way to the end, and it'll still look like the place in England isn't in the database.

15 places: six in Australia, three in South Africa, two in New Zealand, and four others -- but not a single one anywhere near the correct continent. I have to type at least the first three letters of the next level up in order for the English town to show up.

The Search - Records interface appears to behave like the Standardized Place drop-down: it also looks solely in the third jurisdiction level from the end until you get at least three letters entered after a comma. In other words, in the UK, you have to know the county, because the placename is fourth from the end, not third.

Gordon Collett

That place name feature is back this morning so I could test out something that occurred to me based on FamilySearch's tendency to make something look simpler than the programming actually is. I tried two exact place name searches.

First on the incorrectly applied auto-standardized name using my favorite example of christenings being done in the graveyard. ( https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&q.birthLikeDate.from=1840&q.birthLikeDate.to=1840&q.birthLikePlace=Valestrand%20Kyrkjegard%2C%20Stord%2C%20Hordaland%2C%20Norway&q.birthLikePlace.exact=on&q.givenName=ole ) This gave four results all matching the place name exactly:

Then I modified the search to use the "Event Place (Original)" which is not on the standards list because it is wrong ( https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&q.birthLikeDate.from=1840&q.birthLikeDate.to=1840&q.birthLikePlace=Stord%2C%20Valestrand%2C%20Hordaland%2C%20Norway&q.birthLikePlace.exact=on&q.givenName=ole ). This time I got 74 results with the original four being scattered in the top eight spots.

Then I tried a wildcard search, also not picking anything off the drop down list ( https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&q.birthLikeDate.from=1840&q.birthLikeDate.to=1840&q.birthLikePlace=Valestrand%2A&q.givenName=ole ). Now getting 38 results with the original four all at the top:

So I am suspicious that they are aiming for consistency in entering place names across the site in which you can enter a name any way you like or use a set "standard" version. Unfortunately, I would be concerned that since so many people don't understand this technique in Family Tree, they will not understand it here either and get even more frustrated with the Search form.

This will make for some interesting conversations: "Just remember to get familiar with the databases you want to use and if you are trying to find a record from Søndre Bergenhus, Norway, which is abbreviated as SB in the 1865 Norwegian census records, be sure to do a search for Solomon Islands."