Are wildcards allowed in FHL image search?
If I use "F66/1/1920" as a keyword in FHL image advanced search, I get over 4000 unique hits (all passport applications from the Kaunas regional archive in Lithuania, which is my target), but the system is limited to displaying the latest 2000 hits. I could get the number below 2000 by looking just for passports for names beginning with, say, the letter R if wild cards for either one character (?) or any number of characters (*) were accepted, ie
"F66/1/1920/R*" or "F66/1/1920/R???" (each passport file is coded with the first letter of the name plus a unique number which can have up to five digits). Nothing that I've tried works as a wild card, nor does leaving out the number ("F66/1/1920/R") work.
Are wild cards allowed?
Russ Maurer, Pepper Pike, Ohio
Best Answer
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi @Linda Thurson Galloway
On further exploration, I have found that wildcards (? and *) do work in the keyword field on image search. However, they are not allowed within quotation marks, which was how I originally envisioned using them (because my search term includes several slashes, which must be within a quotation to be interpreted as characters, as I intended). I have had to rethink how to set up my searches so they don't involve slashes, allowing me to dispense with the quotes and use the wild cards. I have done this and it works well enough for me, so I consider the question answered. Thank you both!
Interestingly, when you try to use a wild card within quotes, it just fails without explanation in image search. But try the same thing in the full-text search experiment and you get a very direct and helpful error message. It would be nice if they deployed the error message more widely!
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Answers
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Still hoping for an answer re: wild cards in a keyword.
Russ
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I'm not sure if this will help you, but I just found a 4 minute video regarding new use of Wild Cards in historical records. If you would like to try this, log in FamilySearch.org, scroll down the page on right side to Family Search Labs and click on View Experiments. The use of the wild cards is a little different from what you were using. This is new and only has a few collections, but they will be adding more soon.
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@Linda Thurson Galloway, hmm? I don't see anything about wildcards (character substitutions that match more than one character) in any of the experiments on the "labs" page (https://www.familysearch.org/en/labs/).
Which experiment are you talking about?
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Check the item "expand your search with full text" The video illustrates the use of an asterisk as a wild card character representing any number of characters (or no character) within a keyword search, but only (at the moment) for a couple of record sets.
Russ
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@Russ Maurer, the asterisk and question mark are nothing new in FS searches, and I still don't see any mention of them anywhere. The blurb about the Full-Text Search video mentions quotation marks, which would be new on FS (Search and Find use checkboxes for that purpose), but that's not a wildcard.
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Not the blurb about the video. You have to watch the video itself to see what I'm talking about.
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