Search - Records has gone braindead
I've used the Feedback tab thingy on this already, but it's a severe enough problem that I think people need to be aware of it: when Records Search says "no results", don't necessarily believe it.
Since the autostandardization debacle has made the place fields useless, I've been using film numbers (or image group numbers) instead, gleaned from the (stale) Catalog. Last night, I saw that the civil registers of marriages from Sopron now have index entries associated with them.
(You can tell by the Image Index tab and by the graying out of the "Attach To Family Tree" button.) So I figured out the film number and put it into Search - Records -- and got "no results".
Well, balderdash, there's index entries right there, on the tab at the bottom of the images! So I went to one of the entries and checked the Document Information, and discovered (part of) the problem: in the index, the film number has had a bunch of stuff added to it, and that search field is very simplistic: "5054889" does not match "005054889_002_M9SN-V5Z".
Well, grrr, that's more than a little annoying, but that's not actually the big problem. The big problem is what happens when I try to search for a name -- any name -- in that highly-specific image group. For example, I can see a groom named Mihály (=Michael) right there, second on the list when just using the film number.
But if I put in Mihaly as a search parameter (https://www.familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=100&q.filmNumber=005054889_002_M9SN-V5Z&q.givenName=Mihaly), it says No Results.
I tried every name that you can see in that screenshot, with and without diacritics, and got No Results for every single one. In other words, Search - Records is broken: it's failing to find index entries that are Right There and a Perfect Match.
Best Answer
-
@Julia Szent-Györgyi Thanks for the details. We can always count on you to provide clear and detailed explanations. I appreciate that. We're seeing lots of problems with record search and the image indexes. I'll add your report to what we have already submitted in hopes that things will get straightened out before much longer.
1
Answers
-
OK, this is Very Weird. If I give up on the highly-specific image group designation and just pad the number with asterisks, it finds people just fine.
I have no clue what's going on, but I get the feeling that it'd all work fine if the index's "document information" used the bare film/group number, and put all the gibberish in some other field.
0 -
Surely the above variant DGS numbers and the Search problems set out by Julia must be a bug and need to be referred back to the programmers/engineers.
@Maile L , @N Tychonievich could you please refer this on.
If the variant DGS numbers are not a bug, please FamilySearch provide information about how to search using these variant DGS numbers
1